GE Charts a Course for Digital Industrial Growth at Minds + Machines Europe

At Minds + Machines Europe, GE charted its course for digital industrial growth, unveiling new solutions that are purpose built for industrial assets, environments and operations. The event outlined the path for its customers to leverage the company’s Asset Performance Management (APM) and ServiceMax industrial applications, powered by Predix, GE’s platform for the Industrial Internet, to help its customers increase productivity. GE also announced a suite of new industrial applications, solutions and partnerships to help companies leverage the Industrial Internet to enable the digital transformation of industrial companies. The solutions are also built on GE’s suite of Predix-powered tools and applications purpose-built for the Industrial Internet. Together, these solutions and deployments advance GE’s vision for the Industrial Internet with a portfolio designed to help accelerate customers’ transformation journeys and paths to growth for industrial customers of all sizes.

GE Unveils New Advanced Applications, Edge to Cloud Analytics and Robotics to Advance Digital Industrial Transformation for Customers
To reduce cost and eliminate downtime, it is critical for asset-intensive industries to shift from a reactive, break/fix service model to a predictive model. To help achieve this, GE Digital unveiled an integrated solution to deliver the industrial service model that combines ServiceMax, its cloud-based field service management (FSM) solution, with its Asset Performance Management portfolio. Available in late 2017, the combination of ServiceMax + APM will enable industrial companies to enhance how they predict, manage and service the entire asset lifecycle.

GE Digital’s APM and FSM solutions automatically collect and analyze service data, ranging from predictive maintenance needs to failure information and recommended work actions, to help industrial companies move beyond traditional asset monitoring to advanced predictive maintenance and asset performance management.

This new approach also provides enhanced scheduling capabilities. Matching customers’ service workforces with their service needs helps industrial companies dispatch the right engineers to the right job at the right time, and ensure that they are qualified, prepared and equipped to successfully complete their work. Receiving updates from workers in the field, the software provides a closed loop from issue identification to resolution, while 'learning' about more efficient issue resolution methods over time to improve analytics with each alert.

As companies accelerate their digital transformation through the combination of GE Digital’s APM and ServiceMax offerings, they can more proactively manage the entire asset lifecycle, reportedly increasing productivity and operational efficiencies that can lead to future business growth.

Transforming service at the edge
Additionally, GE Ventures launched Avitas Systems, a new data-driven company that will use predictive data analytics, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver advanced inspection services to the oil and gas, transportation and energy industries.

The Avitas Systems solution, using the Predix platform, is built to support the unique service needs of companies with remote assets, particularly in the oil and gas, transportation, and energy industries. The solution helps customers analyze inspection data, integrates regulatory and external sources, such as weather, identifies defects automatically and recommends optimal inspection and maintenance schedules. The system can fuse data from diverse sources and independently analyze the relationships between them for deeper insights, incorporating user feedback to make defect detection smarter and more accurate.

By reducing high-risk tasks through robotics, Avitas Systems can make inspection processes safer and more efficient through data automation, decreasing costs by GE’s estimation of up to 25 percent. By performing inspections based on anticipated risk, instead of regular time intervals, Avitas Systems can also help to increase asset longevity.

GE estimates that service transformation represents a $40 billion market opportunity. With ServiceMax + APM and Avitas Systems, GE is helping industrial companies to manage, optimize and gain insight into their assets across each stage of the lifecycle, all based on the Predix platform that provides computing capabilities from the edge to the cloud. Predix provides GE customers with increased visibility, control and analytic insights to their industrial infrastructure and operations.

Related Announcements in detail:

• Updates to GE’s Operations Optimization application – GE’s Operations Optimization offers real-time visibility into plant and fleet-wide performance. Enabled by edge-to-cloud technology that allows for faster analytics, Operations Optimization helps power generation and utilities businesses improve flexibility, efficiency, capacity, availability, and emissions. The announced updates will help utilities decide where to invest time and resources to improve their KPIs. New capabilities include the ability to measure delivery against performance targets, recommendations on how to better meet targets, and closed feedback technology that will help utilities make changes and improve performance.
• GE announces Digital Worker Capabilities – As part of the APM dashboard, work orders will connect with field service technicians to dispatch and provide information for operations and maintenance. Workers can submit completed Operations & Maintenance (O&M) information back into the system, closing a loop from problem identification to resolution. This field service data makes the APM application more intelligent with each work order and enables better analytics with each alert.

GE Launches Predix Software for Power Producers and Utilities to Break Down Barriers between Operations and Commercial Silos, with Data-Optimized Energy Trading & the ‘Digital Utility’
To help utilities navigate the changing energy market, GE Power unveiled the ’Digital Utility,’ a suite of Predix-based applications that connect real-time machine data with a utility’s profitability. The new Business Optimization software brings analytics to the business side of power and utilities companies to help energy traders act more profitably in long-term, day-ahead and short-term wholesale markets. The Digital Utility includes updates to GE Power’s Operations Optimization software, incorporating closed-loop analytics to help improve generation efficiency for entire fleets. Additionally, GE’s APM solutions for energy businesses now connect all assets across the entire Electricity Value Network (EVN) in an integrated application, providing customers with a single view of assets spanning power generation to the grid.

This expanded suite of Predix-based software applications expands the portfolio of solutions for power producers and utilities. The new ‘Digital Utility’ solutions connect energy traders with real-time plant productivity and capacity data to enable more analytics-informed trading.

Additional new offerings unveiled with the announcement include the Baseline Security Center to further increase operational security for power producers, and services designed to help utilities plan for a digital transformation.

GE’s ‘Digital Utility’ solutions are designed to help electricity businesses navigate changing markets. Low demand growth, falling wholesale power prices, excess capacity from the growth of renewable energy sources, and long-term investments in thermal generation are greatly impacting power and utility businesses’ profitability.

For energy businesses across the Electricity Value Network (EVN), remaining profitable means responding quickly to short-term trading opportunities, maximizing capacity for peak demand periods, and strategically planning to address long-term supply and demand trends. That requires traditional fuel types to respond quicker and more flexibly to demand and supply fluctuations.

GE’s Digital Utility software suite is designed to connect data from electricity generation, distribution and transmission assets to enable more informed financial decision making. The software suite leverages more than 100,000 GE Digital Twins across energy to deliver insights about efficiency, capacity, emissions, flexibility, and availability that traders can use to bid with added confidence in long-term, day-ahead, and short-term markets.

With the ‘Digital Utility,’ GE is announcing updates and new capabilities across the entire Predix-based suite of applications for energy, including:

• Business Optimization for more profitable trading – GE’s new Business Optimization application helps to enable real-time communication between trading and operations to conduct the bid to bill process. The Business Optimization application alerts a generation business of more profitable trading opportunities, which can be profitable short-term opportunities, and informs what the utility can bid into market. The application allows utilities to engage in new profit pools, such as the market for ancillary services to help manage grid stability, and new market opportunities, such as cross-border trading. Deployed as a full stack, the Asset Performance Management, Operations Optimization, and Business Optimization applications connect machine and operations data with a utility’s bottom line.
• GE delivers Asset Performance Management (APM) across the Electricity Value Network (EVN) –GE is introducing a single dashboard view of asset health across the entire EVN, including renewables, traditional power and grid. Drawing on GE’s Digital Twin technology and an analytics catalog based on more than 125 million hours of machine operating data, APM covers 70 percent of all NERC failure modes for combined-cycle plants.
• New GE Baseline Security Center (BSC) for Power & Utilities–According to GE, more than 60 percent of power leaders believe their security strategy is not aligned with today’s risk environment. Many utilities struggle to maintain current versions of software or to run the latest security “patches” from vendors. GE’s new Baseline Security Center offers a set of tools, configurations, and services focused on reducing cybersecurity risk across the EVN. Based on recommendations from the Center for Internet Security, GE’s Baseline Security Center offers services including patch management, anti-malware, identity management, network and host hardening, and intrusion detection.
• New Digital Services for Power and Utilities– GE introduced three new types of services to help power producers and utilities develop digital strategies. New Digital Transformation Services include Digital Visioning workshops, a Digital Effectiveness Assessment, Business Value Engineering, and Digital Transformation Mapping. New Digital Plant Services provide digital subject matter experts to help customers implement recommendations drawn from the Digital Transformation process. New Tiered Support Services provide customers different levels of support tied to their ongoing use of GE’s Business Optimization, Operations Optimization, and Asset Performance Management software applications.

Partnership Announcements:

Advanced Utility Operations: GE Digital alliance partner PwC showcased its Predix-powered commercial operations solution for utility companies. This solution enables executives to identify margin ‘leakage.’ The solution analyzes plant performance data from GE’s Operations Optimization application, commercial data from dispatch and market-facing system from GE's Business Optimization application. The solution is expected to launch this summer.

Insight-Based Energy Management: GE Digital and EY highlighted the Manufacturing Energy Management Solution (MEMs) from EY, powered by Predix, which helps to transform how OEMs manage energy consumption. MEMs offers analytics for real-time decision making, providing immediately available data and giving insights into energy consumption at the enterprise-wide and individual operating center levels. MEMs helps manufacturers manage energy consumption in production, factor energy usage into planning and execution decisions, as well as help to improve cost, efficiency, innovation, greenhouse gas emissions and water conservation.

Reduced Carbon Dioxide Emissions: GE Distributed Power and Dalkia announced that through GE distributor Clarke Energy, the companies have equipped more than one-third of Dalkia’s 170+ Jenbacher gas engines with GE’s myPlant* APM solution, powered by Predix. In total, the fleet of engines could power more than 240,000 French households, resulting in lower carbon dioxide emissions, which equates to taking nearly 100,000 European cars off the road annually.

Predix-Powered Clean Energy: GE Renewable Energy and Fina Enerji signed a 10-year full service agreement that covers 150 GE wind turbines in Turkey. The deal will implement GE’s Predix-based Digital Wind Farm hardware and software solutions, which use data analytics to increase wind farm operations. With these digital capabilities, GE Renewable Energy will help develop smarter wind power forecasts for the Turkish market.

Predix-Enabled Additive Manufacturing: GE Additive will add Predix edge technology to its Concept Laser M2 cusing additive machines. This move allows customers to remotely monitor and collect data from their machines – helping them analyze trends and uncover insights to improve asset performance and operations.

Data-Driven Drilling: Last year, GE's Marine Solutions and Maersk Drilling announced a partnership to collaborate on a data analytic-driven pilot project, aimed at increasing Maersk’s drilling vessel’s productivity by reducing maintenance costs by up to 20 percent and increasing drilling productivity. The deployment of SeaStream Insight, GE’s APM solution for Marine powered by Predix, is showing productivity improvement and reduced maintenance costs, and Maersk and GE are looking to expand onto Maersk’s second rig, Interceptor, to broaden the outcomes achieved from the pilot project.

Keywords: Business Optimization, Generating Capacity, Digital Utility, Energy Traders, Renewable Energy, Digital Transformation, Predix-powered, Asset Performance Management, Cloud Analytics, ARC Advisory Group.