GE Aviation wanted to better monitor the performance of the jet engines it sells to customers around the world. The engines operate under a wide spectrum of climates and environmental factors that may impact engine viability. The manufacturer realized that the ability to access all types of data (structured, semi- structured and unstructured content) would allow them to significantly enhance its service efforts. The customer’s goal is to be proactive in the monitoring of their customer’s engine usage in order to improve their responsiveness and increase customer satisfaction.

1. Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02466 USA • o +1.857.226.5040 • f +1.857.226.5072
info@attivio.com • www.attivio.com
Customer challenge: GE Aviation wanted to better monitor the
performance of the jet engines it sells to customers around the world. The
engines operate under a wide spectrum of climates and environmental
factors that may impact engine viability. The manufacturer realized that the
ability to access all types of data (structured, semi- structured and
unstructured content) would allow them to significantly enhance its service
efforts. The customer’s goal is to be proactive in the monitoring of their
customer’s engine usage in order to improve their responsiveness and
increase customer satisfaction.
Customer needed a flexible and open solution: After a review of Oracle
Endeca and Microsoft FAST, GE Aviation selected Attivio’s Active
Intelligence Engine (AIE). Attivio was chosen for its flexiblity, open support
of GE Aviation’s TIBCO Spotfire business intelligence (BI) dashboard tool and
the ability to put structure to all forms of data and content.
Unlike traditional data warehouses and other information management
solutions, Attivio AIE freely integrates and correlates all enterprise
information – structured data, semi-structured and unstructured content
alike – with no advanced data modeling required. Attivio can present this
unified information via standard BI tools with native SQL support and
ODBC/JDBC connectivity, or a Google® like search inteface for the non BI
tool user.
The company realized that Attivio provides new analytics and insights that
managers were looking for – well beyond what was possible working with
structured data, semi-structured or unstructured content separately.
Increasing customer satisfaction using data: The company used Attivio for
rapid development of BI dashboards to visually analyze the performance of
its engines, in service around the world, at a new level of depth and breadth
of detail. Doing so would greatly enhance insight for business agility, with
highly proactive management of its customer engine fleets for significantly
greater efficiency and customer satisfaction.
The BI dashboards now presents increasing levels of detailed information,
by customer, engine fleet and engine type, down to each engine.
Providing a 360° view from multiple data sources: GE Aviation identified
several essential performance metrics, requiring data from multiple sources,
including:
 Engine diagnostic data constantly generated by sensors throughout
each engine’s operation, approaching “big data” volumes.
 Engine service status data (e.g., engine utilization, service hours since
last maintenance, etc.).
 Manufacturing quality metrics, already maintained in a data warehouse.
 Customer Resource Management (CRM) records.
Attivio: An Analyze
Everything Platform
GE Aviation needed a flexible and
open solution to analyze data
from any source – structured and
unstructured – using popular BI
tools and without advance data
modeling.
Customer quotes:
“We should use Attivio AIE and
follow this approach for all our
strategic projects.”
“We can use Attivio AIE here, we
could use it there, and we could
use it everywhere!”
Business Intelligence Case Study:
GE Aviation
GE Aviation is the world's leading producer of
large and small jet engines for commercial
and military. GE's history of powering the
world's aircraft features more than 90 years
of innovation.

2. Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02466 USA • o +1.857.226.5040 • f +1.857.226.5072
info@attivio.com • www.attivio.com
Attivio’s AIE universal indexing integrated all of these structured data
sources without requiring any advance data modeling; which in itself
significantly accelerated the BI iterative development process. Additionally,
AIE performed automated analytic workflows on incoming data tables to
calculate the performance metrics, including counts of service requests,
engine failures, engine alerts for readings beyond normal levels, and more.
Expanding the view with unstructured data: Having selected Attivio’s AIE
as its BI platform, GE Aviation was able to complete its informational picture
by also integrating and correlating critical unstructured content, including:
 Customer case management notes.
 Engine maintenance system notes (i.e., extended ‘memo’ text fields
containing service technician notes and comments).
Attivio AIE ingested the above text-based information, applying its advanced
text analytics to enrich and normalize the content. Some of Attivio’s text
processing capabilities include entity and key phrase extraction with the
ability to normalize terms, synonym expansion and spelling correction.
Attivio’s text analytics maximize the value to the BI user by correlating
structured and unstructured content for a more complete understanding
the business, beyond what would be possible working with KPIs alone.
GE Aviation senior management staff can now explore and discover new
correlations between changes in metrics, recurring key phrases such as
‘engine overheating’ written in the service notes, and match it against the
engine data collected along with the service work performed. By
integrating, correlating and presenting these structured and unstructured
sources of information into a single analytic dashboard, the company has
realized a new, deeper level of operational insight to more quickly and
proactively identify the root causes of problems and take corrective action.
Setting a new standard for BI time to market: Attivio’s BI pilot was ready to
present to the key business stakeholders in just five weeks, easily beating
the original estimate of 18 months first projected by GE Aviation.
Feedback was remarkable: GE Aviation’s internal BI team and Attivio were
praised for “setting a new standard for BI time to market.”
Impressed with the complete agile BI delivered, stakeholders said the
company “should use Attivio AIE and follow this approach for all our
strategic projects.”
© 2013 Attivio, Inc. All rights reserved.
Attivio, Active Intelligence Engine, and all other
related logos and product names are
registered trademarks of Attivio. All other
company, product, and service names are the
property of their respective holders.
Time-to-market was
critical…
GE Aviation estimated 18
months to deploy the pilot
using the legacy product.
Attivio AIE was deployed
in five weeks.
Customer praise: “Setting
a new standard for BI time
to market”