Quality Initiatives

In line with GE's unprecedented company-wide effort to understand and apply Quality methods to increase customer satisfaction, GE Americom is evaluating and improving its performance, with a goal of Six Sigma Quality by the year 2000. Six Sigma performance corresponds to performance that is 99.99966% defect-free, or 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

How are we striving toward this goal? By making the customer the focus of everything we do. We listen to our customers, and improve our products and services to better satisfy their expectations. We are applying Quality improvement methods to every aspect of our business, from satellite management to contracts and billing.

Nearly all of our associates have been trained in Quality practices, and Americom quality boards meet monthly with our internal Business Quality Council as well as our parent company, GE Capital, to review progress we have made in process management and process improvement.

Putting Quality Initiatives to Work:

A Six Sigma Launch. We achieved this impressive target with the launch of GE-2 in January 1997. The object of any launch is to place a geosynchronous satellite as close as possible to its assigned orbital slot-the "bull's eye." This minimizes consumption of stationkeeping fuel and increases the spacecraft's service life. Our GE-2 launch did better that hit the center of the bull's eye, it threaded the eye of a needle! This precision extended GE-2's 15-year life expectancy by 8 months.

Traffic Transition Exercise. The transition of traffic from the GE Spacenet 3 satellite and those operated by other service providers to the newly launched GE-3 hybrid spacecraft required superb teamwork. In addition, some of these customers moved back to Spacenet 3 after it relocated to a new orbital position. These maneuvers comprised an extremely complex operation requiring precise coordination between Americom's transition team and its counterpart at customer locations. Multiple transitions were executed so smoothly that we received accolades from customer such as Associated press and the State University of New York.

Quick Lock-on for Satellite News Gathering. During a natural disaster such as flood, major fire or accident, news teams scramble to cover the event using vans equipped with antennas to beam reporting back to their network operations center. Speed is essential to maximize coverage. Americom knows this, so we devised a procedure that cut 30 seconds off the time required for SNG (Satellite News Gathering) vans to lock on and confirm satellite capacity.

Improving Earth Station Reliability. Antenna de-icing and uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) are like water and electricity-you don't think about them until you are without them. Americom has 129 antennas in locations where snowfall and ice can accumulate in the "dish" and degrade performance. These and other Americom locations are also susceptible to power outages that could shut down a facility. Improved processes that we identified and implemented in quality programs during he first quarter of 1997 reduced defects that cause failures to less than 5 parts per million, down from more than 400.