GE’s Minds + Machines Conference Is Platform for Announcements Around Its Brilliant Manufacturing Suite

GE Launches Brilliant Manufacturing Suite to Help Manufacturers Increase Production Efficiency, Execution and Optimization through Advanced Analytics

GE announced the next version of its Brilliant Manufacturing Suite at its fourth annual Minds + Machines conference. Field-tested and optimized within GE's own factories, the suite helps maximize manufacturing production performance through applying advanced real-time analytics.

GE's Brilliant Manufacturing Suite allows customers to integrate and aggregate data from design to service and leverage analytics to support decision-making, which helps allow manufacturers to drive improvements in end-to-end production. Analyzing data in context and providing the right information at the right time allows for better decision support throughout the manufacturing process.

GE's next generation Brilliant Manufacturing Suite includes:

• OEE Performance Analyzer - available for early access today, it transforms real-time machine data into actionable production efficiency metrics so that Plant Managers can help to reduce unplanned downtime, maximize yield and increase equipment utilization.
• Production Execution Supervisor - digitizes orders, process steps, instructions and documentation with information pulled directly from ERP and PLM systems. Factories are helped to ship higher quality products and deliver new product introductions faster by getting the right information in the right hands to focus on the highest priority manufacturing tasks.
• Production Quality Analyzer - real-time identification of quality data boundaries that catch non-conforming events before they occur. Quality engineers can analyze this information to identify patterns and trends that enable factories to ship higher quality products faster.
• Product Genealogy Manager - builds a record of all personnel, equipment, raw materials, sub-assemblies and tools used to produce finished goods. Service personnel can respond to customer and regulatory inquiries with confidence, knowing who, what, when, where and how for an individual shipment.

GE's industrial Brilliant Manufacturing Suite leverages GE's Predix platform for edge-to-cloud connectivity, security and manufacturing analytics. Predix capabilities are extended with a rich partner ecosystem that includes Cisco and PTC. Together, these solutions implement GE's Brilliant Manufacturing Suite.

GE's Brilliant Manufacturing Suite can be delivered through flexible deployment and software as a service delivery models to help reduce Capex and minimize OpEx investment.

GE and Cisco Collaborate to Accelerate Manufacturing Productivity

GE and Cisco have teamed up to develop a set of best practices for deploying GE's Brilliant Manufacturing Suite within a modern Cisco IT environment. This reference architecture from GE and Cisco, architecting a robust manufacturing network for the Internet of Things, provides a blueprint for combining GE's digital industrial solutions with Cisco's more flexible and secure networking infrastructure in order to create a digital thread that will capture machine data on the factory floor.

This solution will combine GE manufacturing software that provides real-time, role-based dashboards that helps to deliver more products, faster and with increased quality, with Cisco's secure networking technology. It will lay the foundation for machines that communicate, share data and insights with other machines and the humans that utilize them.

Manufacturers are looking for ways technology can help them to achieve key outcomes of reducing downtime, and increasing efficiency and output. In addition, they are focused on increasing product quality and safety, and reducing energy consumption and waste. GE's Brilliant Factory solutions use big data, software, sensors, controllers and robotics to help increase productivity and deliver asset and operations optimization.

This go-to-market partnership builds on GE's and Cisco's strategy to connect the growing number of machines to the Industrial Internet. Last year, GE and Cisco announced they are integrating Predix software on Cisco networking products to help enable the collection and analysis of asset performance and operational data in the network. One of the first of these devices is a Predix-ready Cisco router in a ruggedized form-factor for harsh environments such as oil and gas facilities.

GE and PTC Form Broad Strategic Alliance to Pursue Brilliant Factory Opportunity

GE and PTC announced that the two companies are partnering to deliver a manufacturing solution that will be available within GE's Brilliant Manufacturing Suite. This new GE-branded manufacturing solution leverages the capabilities of PTC's ThingWorx Industrial Internet of Things application enablement environment. The result is an industry-hardened solution that features more flexible dashboards and more powerful data analytics integrated with GE's software capabilities on the manufacturing plant floor.

The joint solution connects disparate systems, from the shop floor to the ERP, and offers a dashboard and differentiated user experience with consumer-like drag-and-drop capabilities tailored to each user's role.

GE and PTC will align their respective global manufacturing sales and marketing teams to jointly pursue opportunities worldwide. As GE is one of the world's largest manufacturing companies, the GE-PTC solution will be implemented within GE's internal manufacturing plants as part of its Brilliant Factory initiative.

Leveraging PTC's ThingWorx technology as part of GE's Brilliant Manufacturing Suite provides manufacturing optimization capabilities coupled with:

• Role-based manufacturing dashboards with real-time manufacturing KPIs
• Standardized KPI models for all plants, connecting to heterogeneous system landscapes
• Collaboration, alerts, notifications and access to actionable data to make more informed decisions

GE and PTC will also work together to certify ThingWorx for the Predix ecosystem.

GE Digital's SmartSignal Powered by Predix to Drive Improved Equipment Performance and Reduced Unplanned Downtime

GE also announced that its predictive analytics solution, SmartSignal, will be available as part of GE Digital's Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions on the Predix platform, the company's purpose-built cloud platform for industry. SmartSignal powered by Predix will deliver anomaly detection with early warning capabilities that is SaaS based and at a lower cost and higher speed, making it more accessible to a broader range of distributed equipment.

Companies see condition-based maintenance as a means to cut existing operations & maintenance costs. With SmartSignal powered by Predix, they will be able to better capitalize on cloud and Big Data platforms to drive more efficient and productive operations.

GE Power & Water Unveils the Digital Power Plant to Meet Increasing Global Demand

GE also announced Digital Power Plant, a software and hardware solution that creates a virtual ''Digital Twin'' of an industrial power plant complex. Powered by GE's Predix platform, an operating system of the Industrial Internet, "Digital Twin" is a collection of physics-based methods and digital technologies that are used to model the present state of assets in a Digital Power Plant or a Digital Wind Farm. This technology lets utilities monitor and manage aspects of the power generation ecosystem to generate electricity with real-time control.

Central generation of energy will account for up to 95 percent of the energy mix by 2025, and GE's Digital Power Plant will enable GE's utility and industrial customers to harness information technologies to better optimize the underlying infrastructure that generates electricity, in a manner that will help change the way electricity is generated and managed. This will help minimize the impact of power production and consumption to the climate. The expected benefits reported by GE include up to $230 million for a new combined-cycle gas power plant and up to $50 million for an existing combined-cycle gas-powered plant in savings. Across the power industry today, this could equate to up to $75 billion in savings based on GE data.

As a major supplier of power generation equipment and the developer of Predix, GE has been able to combine a hardware and software solution to digitize complex power assets and systems. Once an entire power plant is digitized, it can deploy applications powered by the Predix platform to help continuously improve assets and operations. Predix is a cloud and platform built to help support the scale and requirements of industrial data. It also is a platform with security and governance built in to allow developers to build, test and deploy applications for highly regulated industries. Incorporating experience in operational security and information security, Predix Cloud is designed with security protocols, including customized, adaptive security solutions for industrial operators and developers.

 

Keywords: Manufacturing Production, Real-Time Analytics, Edge-To-Cloud Connectivity, Security, Manufacturing Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), ARC Advisory Group.