GE Aerospace Delivers Safe, Secure and Sustainable Flights

Advancing Flight For Future Generations

GE Aerospace is a leading global provider of jet and turboprop engines, and integrated systems for commercial, business and military aircraft. The company is using its 100 years of expertise to create a new era of growth in aerospace and defense—meeting the industry’s needs both for today and tomorrow.

Brittany Elwonger, Scheduling and Risk Leader for the Program Management Office at GE Aerospace, explains what makes working at the company so special: "GE is a global company, so when you hear that name, you think of a billion different products.”

“I feel so honored to work in the aviation industry. On the military side of the business, you're building a product that brings people home safely. And that's so important,” Brittany adds. “That gives back to not just the industry or the people buying the aircraft, but the people that are actually flying them. We have a huge impact on people's lives, even if they don't know it.”

It’s not just military personnel and their families who GE Aerospace are affecting for the better. The company is also helping drive sustainable flight. Working with NASA and Boeing, it’s bringing aircraft fuel into the future with greener alternatives that will lower CO₂ emissions and help reduce the impact of flying on the planet.

Putting Data To Work To Increase Flight Safety And Reduce Risk

Safety and security are on the line with all of GE Aerospace’s projects, so it needs to be confident that everything is running accurately and that each process meets the highest standard. The company has been using Deltek’s Open Plan enterprise project planning and scheduling software for its scheduling management needs for 30 years. And although it was introduced long before Brittany’s tenure with GE Aerospace, she can still see its impact.

“I got to meet the individual who first brought Open Plan to GE,” says Brittany. “And I believe that he still has relationships with the team at Deltek. He's showed me what he used before Open Plan and it was like an overhead projector—and they would write on it with dry erase markers and that type of thing. When we brought Open Plan on it was a big investment. And we've kept with it all these years to improve schedule quality and optimize program management.”

Simpler, More Accurate Scheduling For Everyone

Now Brittany’s team is expanding the use of Deltek’s Open Plan at GE Aerospace. “We're actually working on a huge project right now,” Brittany tells us. “Our internal customers and external customers, they're sick and tired of people trying to do scheduling type activities in Excel spreadsheets. The program managers have been asking for one source of truth.”

“So, the team is working to deliver exactly that,” explains Brittany. “We're taking everything from engineering design milestones all the way to putting an engine in an actual test cell and tracking that whole process at a very detailed level in Open Plan.”

After seeing it in action, people who hadn’t used Open Plan before are now requesting training and access so they can get the benefits for their projects, too.

“’Open Plan’ has been a buzz phrase lately. It's the tool everyone wants to use to track everything and have that source of truth,” Brittany adds. “And it's really funny to watch these brilliant engineers interact with a scheduling tool. That's where my team comes in and we help them out. We load the data for them, we do all the linking. We're helping them set up the processes for their meetings.”

Organization And Compliance GE Aerospace Can Rely On

GE Aerospace uses Deltek Open Plan across its projects. From day-to-day engine production tasks on the assembly floor to delivering billion dollar earned value management programs, the software helps the company to create the detailed schedules it needs to perform.

“For the earned value programs, we use sub-projects and we build them into a master,” explains Brittany. “We do it based on our work breakdown structure—which is by module for the engine—which is awesome. And then we use all the inner project links and look at that from a master level.”

“With Open Plan, if I'm working eight different earned value management programs, I can sort everything into my folder,” Brittany adds. “And I can just click right there and see all those files and schedules that make up the masters for those programs. So it's pretty organized and all together.”

With strict regulations on government contracts, it’s not just organization that Open Plan delivers—it also helps them demonstrate compliance. “It gives us that ability to know we're compliant, to know we have a strong schedule, to know that it's telling the truth of where we're at once a month,” says Brittany. “And when we’re able to submit that to the government, we've got all the confidence in the world of our deliverable.”

GE Aerospace And Deltek: A True Partnership

In GE Aerospace’s long history with Open Plan, Brittany reflects on how the solution has grown with the company and how GE Aerospace’s partnership with Deltek has become invaluable.

“One thing I absolutely love about Deltek is that when I go to industry conferences, like NDIA, Deltek product experts are sitting right next to me,” Brittany tells us. “Sometimes I come to things like Deltek ProjectCon and I'm being told about a change that the Defense Contract Management Agency is implementing, Deltek is telling me about it and they're preparing me for that.”

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