John Lammas, the 56-year-old vice president for power generation engineering, started his working career 40 years ago, on the shop floor of a Rolls-Royce jet engine factory in Birmingham, England. He has been with G.E. for 31 years, moving up the ranks of the company’s jet engine and power turbine divisions.

“I’m an old mechanical guy,” he said. But a couple of years ago, he issued an edict: no more paper drawings.

In the past, a model of a new part would be made and then converted to detailed blueprints running to 70 pages or more. These would then be physically sent to G.E. manufacturing engineers and outside suppliers to begin setting up the tooling, casting and cutting for the part.

This prototype-and-blueprint routine took up to eight weeks. Now, engineers use 3-D computer models, skip the prototype step and instantly send the models electronically.

This goes a step beyond computer-aided design, which is commonplace. In Greenville, the designers are for the first time linked directly with manufacturers and suppliers in real time, in what G.E. calls a “digital thread.” This means they can collaborate in ways that have changed the work process while making it more likely that problems or defects are spotted sooner.

Traditionally, one set of engineers designed a part, and only then passed it on to manufacturing. If a problem arose on the supplier side, the design was kicked back and the process started over. “Jobs are combining in this digital world,” Mr. Lammas said.

Greenville’s own equipment has been a Predix guinea pig. The machinery and factory were retrofitted with data-generating sensors and the software. Matt Krause, the plant manager, said that last winter, when a snowstorm shut the factory for a day, the sensor network detected that the plant had consumed 1,000 pounds of argon, an inert gas used in coatings for parts. The leak was fixed, saving $350,000 a year.