The FINANCIAL -- GE Appliances announced the opening of its GeoSpring Hybrid Water Heater manufacturing facility at Appliance Park in Louisville, Ky. – the first to open there since 1957.

The $38 million investment in the new product and a revitalized facility is the first milestone in commitments GE has made since 2009 to invest a total of $1 billion and create more than 1,300 new jobs in the U.S. by 2014. According to General Electric Company, the new product and other recent investments at Appliance Park has also created hundreds of highly skilled salaried jobs in fields like engineering, industrial design and manufacturing.

Lean manufacturing and a more competitive wage structure for new employees led to the selection of Louisville as the production site for the new water heater instead of China, where an earlier version of the product was made. Not only can the new product now be made more competitively in the U.S., the GeoSpring Hybrid Water Heater, developed by the Louisville team, has an enhanced feature set, offers better performance with greater energy savings and will be more affordable for consumers.

The GeoSpring has the distinction of being the first GE Appliances product designed and built using Lean manufacturing principles. The Lean process, which uses a cross-functional team of employees – including hourly manufacturing workers – to design the product and the manufacturing process, will help increase the competitiveness of the operation by identifying and removing waste in materials and work effort often found in traditional manufacturing.

State and local governments also supported putting the new GeoSpring in Louisville with up to $17 million in incentives to design and build the new energy-efficient facility and other investments that the company will make at Appliance Park during the next several years.

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