GE Healthcare has postponed plans for a $50 million expansion of its historic West Milwaukee location that would involve consolidating its CT-scanner manufacturing in the Milwaukee County suburb and relocating hundreds of employees to West Milwaukee from the company’s massive Waukesha campus.
Instead, the company will keep the bulk of its CT manufacturing in Waukesha for now, citing the need to focus on filling orders as its CT business faces heavy demand.
GE Healthcare, which is one of metropolitan Milwaukee’s largest high-tech manufacturers, announced the $50 million West Milwaukee project in September 2020. Initial plans involved relocating CT, positron emission tomography (PET) manufacturing and more operations to West Milwaukee from Waukesha. That plan is being delayed.
Meanwhile, also due to the hot-selling CT products, the West Milwaukee campus on Electric Avenue underwent a $28 million project this year — separate from the $50 million expansion — to increase manufacturing capacity. The West Milwaukee plant makes CT components, tubes and detectors.
Since the original plan was announced in 2020, GE Healthcare has seen a huge increase in CT demand as clinicians worldwide are relying on the imaging device amid the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, GE Healthcare has added over 200 production jobs in the Milwaukee area to support the increased CT demand.
“We are postponing plans to expand our Electric Avenue operations in light of continued, unprecedented demand for our CT equipment, which is used by clinicians worldwide in the battle against Covid-19,” a GE Healthcare spokeswoman told the Milwaukee Business Journal Thursday. “Delivering for our customers is a top priority and we are working hard to avoid any potential disruption to production schedules.”
The $50 million project was to bring more than 1,500 employees to the village in central Milwaukee County and the company’s offices in Wauwatosa at the Milwaukee County Research Park. Now those employees will remain in Waukesha.
One piece of GE Healthcare’s planned expansion in West Milwaukee won a final approval Nov. 16 from the village plan commission. The company leased an existing industrial building at 4775 W. Electric Ave. and planned to employ 120 people there assembling PET machines.
Although the facility was scheduled to start production in the second half of 2022, that’s not going to happen with those jobs staying in Waukesha for now.
The company already told the Milwaukee Business Journal in November it was postponing plans to relocate the CT business to West Milwaukee. However, Thursday was the first time the company said it is putting the entire West Milwaukee project on hold.
“This delay does not diminish our commitment to continue investing in our Electric Avenue site in the future,” the GE Healthcare spokeswoman said.
GE Healthcare’s parent company General Electric (NYSE: GE) announced plans Nov. 9 to spin off the business into an independent company in early 2023. The company didn’t cite that transaction as impacting the decision to postpone the West Milwaukee investment.
The company also has decided it won’t begin moving employees from the Waukesha campus to the Wauwatosa facility at the Milwaukee County Research Park, the spokeswoman said.
GE Healthcare said in September 2020 it planned to sell portions of the Waukesha campus and later listed it for sale.
GE Healthcare informed its employees in October it withdrew a commercial real estate listing for its 561-acre Waukesha campus — a prospect that attracted proposals from multiple prospective developers. The property is near the prime intersection of Interstate 94 and Wisconsin Highway 16.
The project in West Milwaukee was to be one of the largest one-time investments the Chicago-based company has made in one of its sites in the United States, a company executive said during the September 2020 announcement. The company said the plan represented the first example of GE Healthcare’s “intention to concentrate teams and resources in key facilities across Wisconsin.”
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