About months ago, GE Aviation’s subsidiary, GE Electric was on the lookout for a buyer for GE Aviation. Apparently, the Evendale headquartered platform went as far as hiring an investment bank to drive the auction. However, despite allegations of the potential sale, the platform has announced a blockchain-tech centered partnership with Microsoft.
The partnership is centered on the standardization of GE Aviation’s Predix solutions on Microsoft Azure. Thanks to Microsoft Azure, GE Aviation (the aviation giant responsible for jet engines to about 60 percent of the global airline industry) has built a supply chain track and trace blockchain.
“Our vision is being able to trace parts as they are manufactured and the engine when it’s shipped. Then how that engine performs in the field, when to repair it and then re-enter it into the field. If you think about it, a quality event in the aircraft engine industry is catastrophic. And to research that takes months of manual time. Driving efficiencies, accountability, and visibility into the process of making an engine will make us all safer,” said David Havara, blockchain CTO, GE Aviation Digital Group.
TRUEngine
Dubbed as TRUEngine, the technology implemented by the two platforms will be built on the Ethereum blockchain and will function as a mechanism of not just tracking but also collating data related to the production and life cycle of aircraft engines.
According to the applied innovation and digital transformation team’s senior director, Mike Walker, TRUEngine has the effect of stitching their entire supply chain into one view, giving the platforms ‘’one ecosystem repository instead of hundreds, if not thousands”.
Also with the collaboration, GE Aviation Digital Group aims to share the technology across an industry-wide consortium of partners. Several huge industry players have already been invited to join the TRUEngine consortium. As Havara stated;
“We are targeting companies who have already bought our engines – so it could be Delta or Southwest or BA – and they have a maintenance contract with us. We have a kind of ‘razor and blades’ business model where we sell you the engine and then you will sign a maintenance agreement to be TRUEngine-certified and we will maintain that. So, we are rolling this out to our maintenance agreement base.”
The names of the industry players still remain disclosed.
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