Dirk Uhde isn’t the kind of guy who talks a lot about software. So when a team of data scientists and software developers from GE Digital’s European Foundry met him amid the sparks, grime and welding equipment of the industrial plant he manages in southeastern France, he struggled to follow their technical parlance. When he tried to explain how his machinery worked, they didn’t have an easy time either. Yet it was the most productive meeting he’d had in years, he now says. It brought together two very different worlds: the traditional industrial world and the digital world that’s changing how we make things.

Uhde’s plant in Aix-les-Bains, a thermal spa town in eastern France, builds components for gas-insulated substations, which transform high voltage on the electrical grid. As part of the process, he cuts and assembles aluminium pipes for substations working around the world. These pipes come in two sizes: 9 and 11 meters long, and the plant makes about 20 kilometers’ worth per year for these substations.

Uhde’s challenge was really a math problem. The small team that handles pipe cutting must make on average about 600 cuts to fulfill orders each month, or 150 cuts per week. The problem for years had been that about 10 percent of those cut pipes ended up wasted. That’s not because the workers make mistakes but because of the challenge of calculating exactly how to cut up the standard pipe sizes to leave close to zero remnants. It’s the same problem that comes with figuring out exactly how many floorboards you’d need to put down for a room and how best to cut them to avoid squandering your material. The plant can sell the leftover pipe pieces as scrap, but for less than 30 percent of their wholesale price.

“The process used to be completely manual,” Uhde says. One worker would spend at least an hour making calculations and trying to optimize the sequence of cutting, including how many pipes were available to cut, what their sizes were and what sizes were needed by the end of the day. “We’d done it like this for 30 years and tried to find improvements,” he says.

Top: The team figured out there were more ways of making those 600 pipe cuts each month than there were atoms in the universe — roughly 4×1079 possibilities. GIF credit: GE Digital. Above: “Running a plant, you try to improve productivity all the time,”Dirk Uhde says. “And then comes a tool like this which is a quick hit. The key was to bring an expertise into the process which we didn’t have, which was digital.” GIF and image credit: GE Digital

Then in late 2016, GE’s European Digital Foundry contacted Uhde as part of a pilot project to see whether industrial businesses could use software to improve performance. When Vincent Champain, general manager of the European Foundry, arrived from Paris at the plant along with his team of four other digital mavens in January 2017, he had grand plans to fix things. But the two worlds, manufacturing and software, found it difficult to communicate with each other. “My team was looking at them and saying, ‘This cannot work,’” Uhde recalls.

Understanding emerged when both teams put on helmets and safety goggles and moved down to the factory floor where workers were cutting and welding aluminium pipes. For some of the digital team, this was the first time they had actually been on a manufacturing floor. “It was amazing,” says Igor Dniestrowski, a project manager for app development at the Foundry. “This is the moment where we saw the field reality, the production process as well as the people dedicated to their jobs. It is when the concept becomes a true digital industrial application.”

For example, being able to see how heavy the pipes were and how difficult it would be to shift them from the bottom of a pile to elsewhere in the production hall helped the digital Foundry team to start improving the cutting process.

The most efficient method would be to test all the possible solutions first. But that would take a huge amount of time and processing power for any computer. The team figured out there were more ways of making those 600 pipe cuts each month than there were atoms in the universe — roughly 4×10⁷⁹ possibilities, Champain says.

The problem for years had been that about 10 percent of those cut pipes ended up wasted. GIF credit: GE Digital

Yet calculating all those options was possible thanks to cloud computing and Predix, GE’s digital platform for the Industrial Internet. After their tour of the plant, Champain, Dniestrowski and the others went back to their office in Paris. Within just four weeks — by the end of February — they had built an app that calculated how and where to cut each pipe at the Aix-les-Bains plant for maximum efficiency.

Now Uhde uploads his daily pipe-cutting requirement to the app, and “it’s just a few seconds before Predix spits the results out,” he says.

Crucially, the app has reduced scrap waste from 10 percent to 4 percent, which should save the plant an estimated $200,000 this year alone.

Down the line, the app can be revamped to cut waste in other parts of the plant too. Developers at the European Foundry are now working on an algorithm that can suggest the most efficient way to pack the finished pipes into shipping crates. Dniestrowski says it should take about a month to upgrade the app, which Uhde estimates could double or even triple the annual savings from the pipe-cutting algorithm.

“Running a plant, you try to improve productivity all the time,” he says. “And then comes a tool like this which is a quick hit. The key was to bring an expertise into the process which we didn’t have, which was digital.”

The post Waste Not: This App Just Solved A Manufacturing Riddle Larger Than All The Atoms In The Universe appeared first on GE Reports.

The day after Christmas in 2015, workers at the Port of Los Angeles set a personal record. They unloaded a massive cargo ship called the Benjamin Franklin, the largest ever to land in North America, in just three and a half days.

Such brisk efficiency takes lots of planning. The right equipment has to be in place to move the merchandise from the ship and onto trucks and trains for distribution. In this case, it was a months-long logistical exercise — carried out mostly by telephone and spreadsheets.

Port operators knew they could do better. So they partnered with GE to create a pilot program making cargo shipment data visible with GE software. The pilot, which went live this week, will help the port’s complex system of shippers, terminal operators, trucks, rail cars and other components run more efficiently.

A cargo ship in the Port of Los Angeles. The port will pilot GE’s Predix system to improve its operations. Top and above images credit: Getty Images

The companies in the pilot include Maersk Shipping and Mediterranean Shipping, as well as retailers such as The Home Depot and Lowe’s. They will test the system for two to three months at the port’s APM Terminals, with the possibility of expanding it across all 16 Port of LA terminals in the future.

Seth Bodnar, GE Transportation’s chief digital officer, says the port resembles a giant restaurant. “In the past, we didn’t know who to serve until the customer showed up — you didn’t know what was coming off the ship until a couple of days before the ship arrived,” he says.

Such short notice can lead to bottlenecks. The new GE software system makes data available to the ports two weeks before the ship arrives, giving everyone plenty of time to synch their assets. The system will also tell workers the cargo’s final destination so that trucks and machines can be ready to move the goods in the most efficient way possible. The payoff can be huge. Bodnar says that a 1 percent improvement in efficiency at just one port can net $60 million in savings.

“In the past, we didn’t know who to serve until the customer showed up — you didn’t know what was coming off the ship until a couple of days before the ship arrived,” says GE’s Seth Bodnar. Image credit: Getty Images

There are other benefits. Bodnar says that efficiency can also help reduce the port’s impact on the environment by reducing the number of idling trucks.

Port of LA Executive Director Gene Seroka says pulling the pilot program together was a logistical feat in itself. The team had to securely pool terabytes of data from several different databases. They brainstormed with GE on a dashboard to make sense of the data and deliver real-time, comprehensive insights to the right people at the right time. “To keep pace with the rapidly changing shipping landscape, operations at our ports must evolve,” Seroka says.

The partners say that if the pilot is successful, it could scale to other ports across the country. As the world becomes more connected, ships are getting bigger and more complex: Between Asia and the U.S. West Coast the average container ship size has risen 14 percent in the past two years, and seaports account for roughly 90 percent of trade worldwide.

GE’s “In The Wild” video series recently visited the port and talked to Seroka. Take a look.

The post Chips Ahoy: The Port Of LA Is Getting A Digital Makeover appeared first on GE Reports.

Speaking at an annual gathering of industrial executives, Wall Street analysts and investors Wednesday in Florida, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt outlined GE’s strategy as a simplified, digital industrial company with an increased focus on digital and additive technologies like 3D printing.

During his presentation at the Electrical Products Group Conference in Longboat Key, Florida, Immelt reaffirmed GE’s operating framework for the year and illustrated how the company is increasing productivity and gaining market share in a tougher global environment. Immelt added that GE’s cash and capital allocation goals remained on track for 2017. Last quarter, GE’s cash performance was below expectations, but the company expects sequential improvement in cash flow from operating activities throughout the year. GE made no change to its original cash targets for 2017.

In addition to its operating framework and focus on cash, GE is committed to expanding margins and simplifying the company. In the first quarter, GE was $200 million ahead of its original plan to reduce costs throughout the company.

By 2018, GE expects to cut $2 billion in structural costs, with about 100 basis points of margin expansion and 3-5 percent organic growth per year. To date, GE has kicked off several significant actions to reduce the cost of its operations, and the company already is seeing lower costs from optimizing its newest technologies like the H-turbine. Making a more focused company will help GE be more profitable and competitive, Immelt said.

Top image: A titanium bracket for the Airbus A350 XWB passenger jet 3D-printed on a Concept Laser machine (in the front) is 30 percent lighter than its conventionally manufactured predecessor. Image courtesy of Airbus. Above: The first offshore wind farm in the United States near Block Island, Rhode Island, uses GE technology. Image credit: Chris New for GE Reports.

GE also is focusing on improving supplier productivity in its industrial businesses. GE acquired LM Wind Power and combined its engineering and supply chain capacity with one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers. GE Aviation also acquired AirVault, a supplier for cloud-based digital records management, which will boost GE’s asset management and maintenance optimization for its aviation arm.

In the oil and gas sector, GE plans to combine GE Oil & Gas with Baker Hughes to build a new fullstream digital industrial services company. With about $1.6 billion in growth and cost synergies expected by 2020, the new company – a combination of GE’s technology expertise and Baker Hughes’ service capabilities – is uniquely positioned to deliver fullstream solutions to the market, Immelt said. The deal is expected to close in mid-2017.

Throughout the presentation, Immelt highlighted the strength of GE’s portfolio, pointing to innovative products in aviation, power, healthcare and wind. He emphasized that the company’s record $240 billion long-term services backlog brought a number of benefits to GE and its customers, including predictable maintenance costs, higher margins and returns, and more comprehensive services.

For these products and services, digital and additive technologies are changing the way GE operates across its industrial businesses. Earlier this year, GE acquired ServiceMax – a company that brings GE a new set of software and expertise in cloud-based field service management across industries. Last year, GE acquired Concept Laser and Arcam AB – two leading industrial additive companies – to help GE and other customers make more 3D-printed parts and increase productivity. These machines use a combination of software, digital design and additive materials like metal powder to create parts and structures not possible with traditional manufacturing. The GE Store, which is the transfer of technology, expertise and talent across GE’s businesses, allows businesses like Aviation, Healthcare and Oil & Gas to share some of these technologies, Immelt said.

GE’s customers have noticed the company’s progress in digital and additive manufacturing. Recently, the Port of Los Angeles launched a first-of-its-kind pilot program to digitize shipping data. In Europe, GE is creating  a self-aware, digitized fleet of 250 locomotives to optimize freight schedules. Over the weekend, GE announced a $15 billion memoranda of understanding and agreements with Saudi Arabia, including data analytics initiatives across its multiple industries. Approximately $7 billion of these announcements are GE technology and service solutions. In April, GE signed a $3 billion deal with Sonelgaz in Algeria to bring power to  8 million Algerian homes. As the largest services deal in GE Power’s history, it also marks the second-largest Industrial Internet software deal for the business. These are important milestones for GE, and the company is executing its digital industrial strategy, Immelt said. With this strategy, GE will create value for its shareowners, customers and employees, he concluded.

The post Immelt Updates Investors On GE’s Digital Industrial Strategy appeared first on GE Reports.

Many energy experts view Europe as a sort of crystal ball for the energy industry — one that’s showing a decidedly mixed future.

On the one hand, renewable sources like wind and sun provide more power than ever. They are also the fastest-growing sources of energy, accounting for 86 percent of all new generation capacity added to the European market in 2016.

On the other hand, traditional power generation (think coal, gas and nuclear) still plays a role. In 2016, more than two-thirds of power in Europe came from nonrenewable sources. Globally, renewables are expected to reach parity with coal and gas around 2040.

Nevertheless, the speed with which intermittent renewables — the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow — are coming on board is making it harder for European utilities to balance the grid. That’s because the grid, as large as it is, is also a delicate system where supply must match demand at all times or there’s a risk of blackouts. In France, for example, strong winds in the north mixed with a sunny week on the Riviera in the south can lead to a surfeit of electricity that puts the balance at risk.

The intermittency also makes profits hard to find, with European utilities on average struggling to increase profits 1 percent in 2016. Countries around the world are watching how Europe uses thermal generation to keep the grid balanced; prioritizes low-cost, clean and renewable energy; and keeps utilities profitable amid a rapidly changing energy network.

Top: Wind and solar power are intermittent and unpredictable — making them a challenge for energy traders seeking profits. Image credit: Chris New for GE Reports. Above: The Business Optimization app within GE’s new Digital Utility software suite supplies real-time data to traders that can help them make more informed decisions. Image credit: GE Power

The good news is that the Industrial Internet of Things can help. GE, for example, just released Digital Utility, a new software suite that gives energy traders machine and operations data they can use to make more profitable trades.

The suite’s new Business Optimization app supplies real-time data to energy traders, who play a key role in ensuring that supply matches demand and utilities stay in the green. “Traders looking at the day ahead will be able to bid in the most optimal way,” says Scott Bolick, head of software strategy for GE Power. “They can not only make sure that the electricity is able to be dispatched, but also that the best-performing plants are dispatched first.”

Today, most trades are typically based on long-term outlooks — for example, anticipating a surge in demand in the winter when everyone turns on their heaters. But as wind and solar installations depend on fickle weather and make anticipating supply increasingly difficult, more sales are starting to happen on the spot market. This market, at least in theory, soaks up the electricity that needs to be bought and sold immediately.

The challenge is that the spot market requires a speed and accuracy that Wall Street is all too familiar with. Better trades, and profits, depend on better information. But Bolick says the power industry uses only about 2 percent of the energy industry’s data — including the real-time information about a plant’s ability to produce electricity, its efficiency, weather forecasts and consumer demand, as well as forecasting information about how much energy to expect from renewable sources and when to expect it. In some cases, traders rely on spreadsheets or separate information systems to inform market bids.

The Digital Utility software suite brings utility data together by stacking the Business Optimization app on top of GE’s Asset Performance Management, a machine reliability app, and GE’s Operations Optimization, an efficiency and productivity app. Used as a full suite, utilities get an end-to-end view of how the energy network is functioning in real time.

The apps rely on analytics from a catalog of more than 100,000 digital twins, or virtual representations based on actual data from energy assets like power plants. They can model future scenarios, predict potential outcomes, make trading more efficient and help keep the grid stable. “When something goes wrong, traders will know immediately,” says Anna Geevarghese, chief product manager at GE Power Digital. “So when a water pump breaks or a gas turbine needs to go down, they know that information.”

This transparency can also help plants better manage operations so that traditional fuel sources are used when both profitable and necessary. Shutting down and starting up coal-fired plants, for example, is an incredibly labor-intensive — and expensive — procedure. Without having good information about coming electricity demand and supply, plants have to keep burning fuel, running at low levels so that they’re ready to ramp up when needed. With better information, utilities can make informed decisions about whether to shut down a plant or to keep that plant running and trade into the ancillary market, which helps grid stability. Cutting back on unnecessary plant idling will also help reduce emissions.

As the energy market becomes more transparent, Bolick says, it will ease the transition to renewables. “Essentially, we’re trying to provide safe, reliable, secure, affordable and sustainable electricity,” Bolick says. “At the end of the day, what we’re doing here digitally is going to make sure that those five goals are met even as we go through a substantial fuel source change.”

The post Renewable Energy Makes Things Tough On The Grid, But New Software Could Help appeared first on GE Reports.

Outside of the Island of Sodor, where Thomas the Tank Engine and his magical friends live, trains don’t usually speak. That’s about to change in Europe, where locomotives are set to start talking to their operators and maintenance crews through data collected from thousands of sensors.

Across Germany, Britain, France and Poland, 250 locomotives run by Deutsche Bahn Cargo (or DB Cargo), the region’s largest rail-freight company, are being retrofitted with GSM connections to transfer information from sensors and failure data. They will work with GE’s Rail 360 Asset Performance Management (APM) Software, which will analyze the terabytes of input streaming in for insights, and make the freight mover smarter.

DB Cargo trains haul almost everything, from raw resources like coal to finished products like cars. But like all rail and freight operators, they sometimes run into unscheduled delays. A locomotive stuck somewhere on the track can get expensive. ”That’s where our solutions come into the game,” says Huschke Diekmann, GE´s general manager for transportation in Germany.

Above: A locomotive stuck somewhere on the track can get expensive. ”That’s where our solutions come into the game,” says GE”s Huschke Diekmann. Image credit: Deutsche Bahn. Top image: Across Germany, Britain, France and Poland, 250 locomotives run by Deutsche Bahn Cargo (or DB Cargo), the region’s largest rail-freight company, are being retrofitted with GSM connections to transfer information from sensors and failure data. Image credit: Getty Images.

Here’s how: Many modern rail freight operators still perform maintenance checkups on a set schedule driven by mileage or time rather than the actual condition of the parts. But DB Cargo is outfitting each of its locomotives with devices to gather data from sensors that will monitor brake performance, motor temperature and other conditions.

This approach doesn’t apply just to trains. The energy and aviation industries, for example, have started looking at digitizing power plants, oil rigs and jet engines, as well, and connecting them to the Industrial Internet. “Every industrial company is going to have to stake its digital claim about how you do a better job with customers, how you drive cost down, and we can lead this,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt told CNBC’s Jim Cramer last year.

The data from the sensors will move to a shoebox-sized “telematics box” in the back of the driver’s dashboard. From there it will travel every couple of seconds to a control center at DB Cargo’s head office in Frankfurt, Germany, and pop up on screens at one of the dozen or so maintenance depots across Europe. Technicians there can then analyze the data with DB Cargo’s prediction system.

By “2020, we want to have 2,000 locos equipped with intelligent diagnostics — an important step to build ‘self-aware’ trains,” says DB’s Matthias Thomas. Image credit: Deutsche Bahn.

The GE part of the system is running on Predix, GE’s platform for the Industrial Internet. DB Cargo can use that information to predict when components such as the brakes or the water tank might need maintenance. The rail operator also gets daily, weekly and monthly reports and advisories on, say, whether the engine coolant level has dropped and what action to take. “In the old days the maintenance depots didn’t have that information available before something happened,” Diekmann says. “The benefit of this Predix APM solution is you have all the prediction available when necessary.”

Mathias Thomas, vice president for asset projects at DB Cargo, predicts that “the locomotives from the project with GE deliver a significant reduction of service failures and thus help us to improve our overall fleet availability.”

Says Thomas: “The cooperation with GE is an essential part of our ‘TechLOK’ system, where already about 900 locomotives deliver data regularly. [By] 2020, we want to have 2,000 locos equipped with intelligent diagnostics — an important step to build ‘self-aware’ trains.”

The post On The Right Track: Software Is Helping Make European Trains Smarter appeared first on GE Reports.

Talia Kohen exudes enough personal energy to light up a ballroom. But her goals are much grander. “I want electricity to be the factor that unites all of Europe, just like the euro,” she says.

That’s why earlier this year, she pulled together a mostly Israeli team to fly from Tel Aviv to a “hackathon” in Berlin, where they designed a prototype for a virtual currency called ElectroEuro. The currency could allow European utilities to price and trade clean power. “It’s like a bitcoin for energy,” she says. The Ecomagination Challenge Hackathon took place alongside GE’s Minds + Machines Europe digital summit, and team ElectroEuro was one of the winners sharing in €50,000 ($56,000) in cash prizes.

Some 100 developers took part in the event on a sightseeing boat anchored in one of Berlin’s industrial harbors. Most of the participants were men, but Kohen, 32, wasn’t intimidated. The American native has a degree in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University. Upon graduation, she joined Raytheon, where she worked on radar and missile technology. Still wanting to learn more, she moved to Israel’s Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv and enrolled in a master’s program focusing on computer science, artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

But she never stopped looking for opportunities. A few years ago, she applied for Google’s prestigious Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship designed to bring more women into computer science. She made it into the final round, but she didn’t make the cut. So she founded her own group in Israel for female computer scientists called FemTech, which now has more than 1,000 members.

Top: Kohen (center) and Koretzki’s (left)  the team included Haim Bender, Isaack Rasmussen and Idan Nesher. Bender and Rasmussen integrated the prototype with GE’s Predix platform for the Industrial Internet, and Nesher created its user interface. Above: The team arrived in Berlin on Sunday and went straight to the “hacker boat,” as the venue became known. Images credit: GE Reports

Kohen learned of the hackathon when Ira Blekhman, a GE employee in Israel, posted information about it on FemTech’s Facebook page. It said that GE would fly the first 10 applicants to Germany. “I knew that women don’t usually step out of their comfort zone and compete in coding competitions,” Kohen says. “Naturally, I jumped on it.”

Kohen put together a small team and called on the skills she’d learned through Google Outstanding, a public speaking training program. “I didn’t want to leave anything to chance,” she says.

The team arrived in Berlin on Sunday and went straight to the “hacker boat,” as the venue became known. She and her teammates, which included Ran Koretzki, a computer science graduate student from Israel’s Technion technical university, got to work. They gathered information about the amount of electricity different European countries produced and consumed and from what sources. Next, they designed an algorithm that allowed utilities to trade the surplus. “It’s like an energy bank,” Koretzki says. “You can use the ElectroEuro to buy and sell electricity, based on the source.”

In addition to Kohen and Koretzki, the team included Haim Bender, Isaack Rasmussen and Idan Nesher. Bender and Rasmussen integrated the prototype with GE’s Predix platform for the Industrial Internet, and Nesher created its user interface.

When connected to Predix, the prototype would monitor energy production data from eight different sources, including wind and solar, but also coal and nuclear. It could then price the electrons based on availability, distance, stability and friendliness to the environment. “Wind, for example, is very green, but it’s also fickle,” Kohen says. “Coal, on the other hand, is very predictable, but also pollutes the air.”

The team says its solution would enable European governments to promote “clean” energy by allowing utilities to bid on power from the energy source they want. “The whole idea is to promote decarbonization,” Kohen says.

A team from Munich presenting their solution to the jury. Image credit: GE Reports.

The two-day hackathon featured two main challenge areas: electrification (moving to renewable power use and generation) and advanced manufacturing to decarbonize the economy. Kohen’s team won in the electrification category and placed second in building solutions on Predix. (See all the winners here.)

Various European industries had submitted real-world problems for competitors to solve. “It’s really powerful, because they have a real need and are hoping one of the teams finds a solution,” says Elizabeth Wayman, GE’s global director for Ecomagination, which sponsored the hackathon. Eurelectric and Intel also partnered on the hackathon while ESB Networks, European Heat Pump Association, Fraunhofer and Stelia Aerospace contributed data. Competitors, working individually or in groups, had about 36 hours to design a working app prototype.

As the winners in the electrification category, Kohen and her team will be invited to present their app next week at the European electric utility consortium Eurelectric’s annual convention and conference in Brussels.

Ecomagination director Deb Frodl (upper right in pink sweater) with Kohen and the two other winning teams in Berlin. Image credit: GE Reports.

The post Building The Bitcoin For Energy: This Woman Came Up With A Promising New Idea For Trading Clean Power appeared first on GE Reports.

Last summer, a small team of volcano experts supported by the Nicaraguan government and equipped with GE’s digital technology climbed down the gaping maw of Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano. They created the world’s first only zip line into an active volcano, plunging over 1,200 feet just above a huge, heaving lava lake where temperatures regularly exceed 1,000 degrees Celsius. The system allowed the crew to install and reposition wireless sensors that collect pressure, tremors, humidity levels and other data.

Top: Last summer, a team of volcano experts equipped with GE’s digital technology — and super-heat-resistant suits — descended repeatedly into Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano. Above: The world’s only surface-to-volcano-belly zip line enabled the team to install a sensor network to collect pressure, tremors, humidity levels and other data. The end goal: to create an early-warning system for one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Images credit: Qwake.

Located just 12 miles south of the capital Managua, population 2.2 million, the 2,000-foot mountain has been belching noxious sulfur dioxide vapors pretty much nonstop since it last erupted in 2008. The mountain’s restlessness also made it a perfect candidate for modeling it into what may be the world’s first digital volcano whose shudders could be analyzed from afar.

A year later, the GE team has collected enough data to launch a digital version of the lava lake that could allow scientists to predict its next moves and provide a digital early warning system on one of the world’s most active volcanoes. The data is now also available to the public through Predix, GE’s software platform for the industrial internet. Anyone can use it to create apps that can analyze the information and gain new insights about volcanoes. Says Sam Cossman, explorer and expedition leader: “The goal of this project is to mitigate their potential risk and provide people with a better sense of what’s happening.”

The “open-source” expedition launched Aug. 22. You can see it here, and also dive in below:

The post Internet Of Volcanoes: Take A Dip Inside The World’s First Digital Lava Lake appeared first on GE Reports.

The Industrial Internet of Things is transforming industry today. It’s not a far-off dream. Digital industrial leaders that got on board early have been rewarded with improvements to their top and bottom lines. Estimates have productivity gains from the Industrial IoT adding a sizable $10 trillion to $15 trillion to global GDP — the size of today’s U.S. economy — in coming years.

It’s exciting for us at GE Digital to see our investments pay off. But we also should pause to take stock of our progress and refocus on what remains to be done.

For more than five years, I have watched the Industrial IoT evolve — from a concept, to a few early successes, to what is now a rapidly growing market. We built GE Digital to create digital solutions for the industrial world and set out to make GE the proving ground for our new ways of working and our vision of the future. We have learned and adjusted as the market has evolved and as our customers have realized the opportunity.

But one thing is certain — we continue to have a strong outlook on the market and remain committed to pioneering technologies to help companies capitalize on the Industrial IoT.

Where we are today

There’s no one else doing what GE Digital does. Full stop. We have the only global, comprehensive offering that manages the entire asset lifecycle. Our applications help industrials run their assets more efficiently and also make people more efficient, arming them with the right information to make more informed decisions.

In Predix, we have a platform that is purpose-built for these applications. In the 18 months since we launched it, we’ve learned a lot and worked with customers to make Predix a platform that works for them. Industrial IoT is still new and complex — we are making great progress and continue to innovate along the way.

We are gaining momentum. Our Predix-powered solutions are experiencing greater than 100 percent growth year over year, and we expect the trend to accelerate as the market matures. GE was the first to cultivate the Industrial IoT ecosystem, and today we have strong strategic relationships with more than 700 companies that are committed to taking this digital journey with us.

We’re learning alongside our customers. In energy, oil and gas, and aviation, we have hundreds of customers using Predix-based solutions — and more are engaging and designing their own solutions every month. Customers like Exelon, BP and Qantas in our industrial vertical customer base are adopting these technologies and seeing real outcomes.

Where we’ll be tomorrow

But, of course, challenges remain.

We’re competing — with other players that also want to shape the Industrial IoT space, and for the talent that can give us the edge we seek. On both fronts, I like our chances of success.

We are more specific about what success looks like — carving out pure GE Digital product offerings in our revenue measurement and focusing on very specific growth targets. We are on track to meet our growth targets and have more clearly defined what solutions to include in those measurements.

We have the right people. As businesses evolve, so too must the talent. I have never felt better about the talent we have working at GE Digital than I do right now. Strong leadership is something GE does best, and GE Digital’s ability to attract and retain the right talent is proof of that.

With a bold vision, a diversified technology portfolio and a powerful ecosystem, we are progressing within this truly new and unchartered territory. We are confident that we will continue our leadership position in the Industrial IoT market, and we remain committed to our mission of helping industrials realize the powerful outcomes promised by the Industrial IoT.

This is just the beginning and we are excited about what the future holds for GE Digital.

The post Why GE Digital Is Positioned To Lead The Industrial Internet Of Things appeared first on GE Reports.

Last summer, a small team of volcano experts supported by the Nicaraguan government and equipped with GE’s digital technology climbed down the gaping maw of Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano. They created the world’s first only zipline into an active volcano, plunging over 1,200 feet just above a huge, heaving lava lake where temperatures regularly exceed 1,000 degrees Celsius. The system allowed the crew to install and reposition wireless sensors that collect pressure, tremors, humidity levels and other data.

Top: Last summer, a team of volcano experts equipped with GE’s digital technology — and super-heat-resistant suits — descended repeatedly into Nicaragua’s Masaya volcano. Above: The world’s only surface-to-volcano-belly zip line enabled the team to install a sensor network to collect pressure, tremors, humidity levels and other data. The end goal: to create an early-warning system for one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Images credit: Qwake.

Located just 12 miles south of the capital Managua, population 2.2 million, the 2,000-foot mountain has been belching noxious sulfur dioxide vapors pretty much nonstop since it last erupted in 2008. The mountain’s restlessness also made it a perfect candidate for modeling it into what may be the world’s first digital volcano whose shudders could be analyzed from afar.

A year later, the GE team has collected enough data to launch a digital version of the lava lake that could allow scientists to predict its next moves and provide a digital early warning system on one of the world’s most active volcanoes. The data is now also available to the public through Predix, GE’s software platform for the industrial internet. Anyone can use it to create apps that can analyze the information and gain new insights about volcanoes. Says Sam Cossman, explorer and expedition leader: “The goal of this project is to mitigate their potential risk and provide people with a better sense of what’s happening.”

The “open-source” expedition launched Aug. 22. You can see it here, and also dive in below:

The post Internet Of Volcanoes: Take A Dip Inside The World’s First Digital Lava Lake appeared first on GE Reports.

The Industrial Internet of Things is transforming industry today. It’s not a far-off dream. Digital industrial leaders that got on board early have been rewarded with improvements to their top and bottom lines. Estimates have productivity gains from the Industrial IoT adding a sizable $10 trillion to $15 trillion to global GDP — the size of today’s U.S. economy — in coming years.

It’s exciting for us at GE Digital to see our investments pay off. But we also should pause to take stock of our progress and refocus on what remains to be done.

For more than five years, I have watched the Industrial IoT evolve — from a concept, to a few early successes, to what is now a rapidly growing market. We built GE Digital to create digital solutions for the industrial world and set out to make GE the proving ground for our new ways of working and our vision of the future. We have learned and adjusted as the market has evolved and as our customers have realized the opportunity.

But one thing is certain — we continue to have a strong outlook on the market and remain committed to pioneering technologies to help companies capitalize on the Industrial IoT.

Where We are Today

There’s no one else doing what GE Digital does. Full stop. We have the only global, comprehensive offering that manages the entire asset lifecycle. Our applications help industrials run their assets more efficiently and also make people more efficient, arming them with the right information to make more informed decisions.

In Predix, we have a platform that is purpose-built for these applications. In the 18 months since we launched it, we’ve learned a lot and worked with customers to make Predix a platform that works for them. Industrial IoT is still new and complex — we are making great progress and continue to innovate along the way.

We are gaining momentum. Our Predix-powered solutions are experiencing greater than 100 percent growth year over year, and we expect the trend to accelerate as the market matures. GE was the first to cultivate the Industrial IoT ecosystem, and today we have strong strategic relationships with more than 700 companies that are committed to taking this digital journey with us.

We’re learning alongside our customers. In energy, oil and gas, and aviation, we have hundreds of customers using Predix-based solutions — and more are engaging and designing their own solutions every month. Customers like Exelon, BP and Qantas in our industrial vertical customer base are adopting these technologies and seeing real outcomes.

Where We’ll Be Tomorrow

But, of course, challenges remain.

We’re competing — with other players that also want to shape the Industrial IoT space, and for the talent that can give us the edge we seek. On both fronts, I like our chances of success.

We are more specific about what success looks like — carving out pure GE Digital product offerings in our revenue measurement and focusing on very specific growth targets. We are on track to meet our growth targets and have more clearly defined what solutions to include in those measurements.

We have the right people. As businesses evolve, so too must the talent. I have never felt better about the talent we have working at GE Digital than I do right now. Strong leadership is something GE does best, and GE Digital’s ability to attract and retain the right talent is proof of that.

With a bold vision, a diversified technology portfolio and a powerful ecosystem, we are progressing within this truly new and unchartered territory. We are confident that we will continue our leadership position in the Industrial IoT market, and we remain committed to our mission of helping industrials realize the powerful outcomes promised by the Industrial IoT.

This is just the beginning and we are excited about what the future holds for GE Digital.

The post Why GE Digital Is Positioned To Lead The Industrial Internet Of Things appeared first on GE Reports.

Justin Eggart and fellow engineers working inside GE Power’s Monitoring and Diagnostics Center in Atlanta were halfway through their shift a few months ago when they noticed something strange. The center, the largest of its kind in the world, looks a lot like a smaller version of NASA’s mission control center. It has banks of computers and a wall-to-wall, colorful LED screen flashing real-time operating conditions inside 5,000 turbines, generators and other equipment churning away at 900 power plants located in 60 countries and serving 350 million people.

Every day, 1 million sensors attached to the machines send 200 billion data points to the cloud and to computers sitting directly on the machines. Eggart and his team slice it and dice the data with sophisticated software and “digital twins” — virtual versions of the power plans — and look for anomalies. “Our algorithms can run analysis on data that to other people appears as noise,” he says. “Within that noise, we can start to see patterns that allow us to make predictions.”

That afternoon, one of the power stations tracked by the center signaled an alert, even though it seemed to operate normally. “The plant never felt it, never heard it, never saw anything,” says Eggart, the general manager for fleet management technology at GE’s Power Services unit. “But we were sure it was there.”

The GE engineers in Atlanta called the power plant operators, who remained incredulous because they didn’t see any issues on their end, and told them to take a close look at a turbine bearing during the next scheduled maintenance session coming in a few weeks. “They came back and said: ‘You know what, you were right,’” Eggart says. “The bearing wasn’t getting the right lube oil feed, and it was going to fail.”

Spotting a problem early can save a utility a lot of money. Power plants get fined $50,000 if they “trip” and abruptly disconnect from the grid in some cases. This expense is in addition to the money they’re not making while the plant is offline. The costs can spiral into millions of dollars in cases like the bum bearing, especially if operators have to dock their plants for days or weeks because they don’t have spares on hand.

The technology Eggart’s team is using is already smart enough to spot hundreds of similar problems every year. But as of this fall, it has a new brain running on Predix, the software platform GE Digital developed for the industrial internet. The brain is GE’s new Asset Performance Management (APM) software application, and it will make the center’s predictive powers even more formidable, by giving customers more advance warning of issues that might trigger an outage. The “brain” also makes it easier for GE engineers and their customers to compare notes in real time and spot problems before they happen. Customers with the software see exactly what GE’s experts see. As a result, they minimize downtime and optimize power plant performance and save utilities money. “In the past, we had to call plant operators or send them an email,” Eggart says. “Now, they can see the same data I see. It allows us to interact on our smartphones, tablets and PCs and be much more collaborative.”

Top GIF: “Our algorithms can run analysis on data that to other people appears as noise,” says GE’s Justin Eggart. “Within that noise, we can start to see patterns that allow us to make predictions.” Above: The M&D center monitors in real-time operating conditions inside 5,000 turbines, generators and other equipment churning away at 900 power plants located in 60 countries and serving 350 million people. GIF credits: GE Power.

GE started remotely monitoring power plants two decades ago and has amassed a treasure trove of unique operations data. Machines made by the company also generate a third of the world’s electricity, giving it detailed insights into how turbines and generators are built and work. This domain knowledge allows the team at the center to also monitor turbines made by Alstom, Mitsubishi, Siemens and other makers. “We believe we have more data than anybody, and we’ve seen more than anyone,” Eggart says. “We also designed a lot of the equipment and know where to look. We can tailor our algorithms right around that knowledge.”

The most powerful Predix algorithms live inside the cloud. Using information about vibrations, pressure, temperature and other factors, the software, in combination with the specific machine’s digital twin, can predict what might happen in the future and recommend the best time for maintenance or the most optimal ways to run the plant.

But another set of algorithms and digital twins lives in computers located directly on the machines in the power plant, or, as GE calls it, on the edge. “The edge tends to be focused on the here and now, and the cloud allows me to think forward,” Eggart says. “The edge is like me putting a finger on the machine and feeling the vibrations and heat right there. The cloud is the brain that helps me figure out what it all means and what I need to do.”

Still, it’s humans who ultimately divine meaning from the data and decide how to respond to it. “You’ve got your edge and your cloud running your predictive software,” Eggart says. “But they inform the people who provide the service. The relationship is collaborative, not competitive. The AI is not taking over.”

Predix can operate in large cloud environments like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Eggart says that this “makes it easy” to grow the system to whatever size he needs. “I can scale at the push of a button,” he says.

This is handy for solutions like the APM software, which can, say, monitor a gas turbine and run diagnostics, but also optimize maintenance strategy, manage safety and environmental compliance, handle reliability, among many other functions. “All of these pieces of software build upon each other,” Eggart says. “Customers can buy a license and choose whatever level of engagement they want to have.”

Right now, the M&D Center, as GE calls it, covers only thermal power plants, meaning those that use coal or gas as fuel to generate electricity. GE also has monitoring centers for renewable energy in places like New York, as well as globally. But in the future, a similar center could cover “the entire energy value network,” Eggart says. “There’s no reason why we cannot monitor transformers, inverters, power lines, batteries and other technology standing between the power plant and the consumer,” he says. “When it comes to Predix and the cloud, the sky is the limit.”

The post Mission Critical: GE’s New Digital Center In Atlanta Is Using Data From Power Plants To Spot Trouble And Save Money appeared first on GE Reports.

Ask industry leaders about the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and they’ll tell you it will revolutionize business. But ask them what they’re doing to prepare for that, and they’ll acknowledge their organizations don’t have a strong plan in place.

That’s the feedback GE Digital received from a survey of 250 IT and operations executives across five key industries — manufacturing, utilities, power and energy, transportation, and aviation and aerospace. While the Internet of Things connects consumer goods such as televisions, doorbells and cars, the IIoT collects and analyzes data from machines and factories. “The industrial proposition is entirely unique and often daunting,” says Bill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital.

The survey, which GE commissioned ahead of this year’s Minds + Machines, the company’s digital conference taking place this week in San Francisco, found a gap between optimism and readiness for the IIoT.

The survey found that 80 percent of respondents believe the IIoT will transform their companies and industries, and 86 percent say digital transformation is important to maintain competitiveness. The optimism is easy to explain. Experts estimate productivity gains from the IIoT will add $10 trillion to $15 trillion to global GDP — in coming years.

But at the same time, only 8 percent of respondents say their business has fully made the leap to digital, and only 41 percent say their companies are working on updating their businesses with IIoT-ready solutions. Most respondents seem slow to act when it comes to initial digital transformation because they believe it may take up to eight years before their industry realizes the potential of the Industrial Internet. They also say they believe that there will be an ongoing evolution across all industries.

A survey of 250 IT and operations executives across five key industries reveals that the majority of business leaders believe digital transformation is key to staying competitive. But they also cite roadblocks to such a transformation, including skills and knowledge gaps in the workforce. Top gif credit: GE Digital. Above: Lonmin.

Ruh has a greater sense of urgency. “We need to get there faster because it matters to the world,” he says. “It is about entirely new ways to power the world, heal the sick, build our economy and transport people and goods safely and efficiently.”

What’s holding these companies back? According to the survey, the leading barrier to digital transformation — cost — was the highest concern among transportation executives (54 percent) and the lowest among respondents from the manufacturing world, where 34 percent of respondents still ranked it as their top concern. Others flagged return on investment as a high-ranking concern

The survey also sheds light on the gap between workforce readiness and IIoT business needs. Among the top skills respondents believe are necessary but lacking in the current workforce are expertise in using digital interfaces and processes (59 percent); understanding of AI and machine learning (48 percent); and ability to read technical data (48 percent).

GE is helping customers tackle these concerns by showing them how the IIoT can improve the way they do business. For example, working with Australian airline Qantas, GE tapped the power of Predix — the company’s platform for the Industrial Internet — to process more than 10 billion data points covering everything from average engine speeds to maintenance records for individual planes to help the airline become more efficient.

The resulting app, dubbed FlightPulse, gives pilots insight into their own flight data, and alerts them to opportunities where they can conserve fuel and thus reduce carbon emissions. Pilots can also use the app to compare themselves to their peers. This visibility gives pilots real-time feedback to change behavior and improve metrics. The app has helped Qantas nearly double its fuel savings compared to a year ago.

At the Port of Los Angeles, the nation’s biggest, GE is helping operators use data to reduce bottlenecks and get cargo moving more quickly. Previously the port was only able to tell what cargo was arriving in the next two days, making it difficult to have the right equipment, crews and transportation for distribution in place. By pooling data coming from several different databases and presenting that information in real time, GE was able to provide visibility up to two weeks before a ship arrives.

Expect to see more of this in the future as digital technology transforms the way everything in industry operates, finding hidden efficiencies that save money and reduce emissions. “The industrial company of the future will build machines that have the capacity to sense, predict, and respond — with greater speed and insights than ever before,” Ruh says. “A few years ago, the notion of a digitized industrial company was just an idea — with no precedent or playbook. Today, it is a reality.”

The post Industry Sees Its Digital Future But Needs Help Seeing The Path There appeared first on GE Reports.

Hackathons, the whirlwind competitions that challenge developers to solve complex problems in a short period, are like the Olympics for computer programmers. Teams compete for prizes, professional accolades and bragging rights among their peers. But one week last fall, they set their sights on a loftier goal: saving Mother Earth.

The 100 competitors at the first Appathon, held during GE’s Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco, had just 30 hours to conceive and develop a working app for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). “We were forced to make sure we had something of value in a very short period of time,” says competitor Christian Berg, a senior program manager at Microsoft. “We had to be laser-focused.”

Berg and his four Microsoft teammates, Mike Zawacki, Maarten van de Bospoort, Jenna Goodward and Shirley Wang (who came all the way from China) brought their A game. The team won its division with a “bring your own device” app, named BYODevice Demand Response, that could maximize renewable energy consumption by suggesting the best time to use electric devices based on demand on the grid and renewable energy output.

The BYOD app takes advantage of the increasing number of IoT devices. If the BYOD app comes to market, users could download it to any of the growing number of IoT devices, including electric cars, printers, dishwashers, mobile phones, thermostats, washers, smart refrigerators, lamps and laptops. The more devices are connected, in theory, the better informed the app will be.

The Microsoft team’s app would mine data collected using Predix to determine the optimal time to charge, consume power or discharge power, making the devices “smart” energy users. The app would consider the current demand on the grid and what percentage of the power is being generated by renewables at a given time, among other factors. “The app will send a signal to the devices all around us alerting them to the best time to use electricity,” says Microsoft’s Jenna Goodward, senior program manager for renewable energy. A laptop with the app, for example, might be plugged in at 10 p.m. but won’t start charging until 3 a.m., while a thermostat would be alerted throughout the day to cool buildings when the electricity being generated is as close to 100 percent renewable as possible. Renewable energy sources can vary as wind speeds change or when the sun sets.

The team started with a lightning round of brainstorming that yielded two potential ideas. The BYOD app stood out because it could be easily scalable — dozens or millions of people could use it.

The app takes into account a number of factors — when renewables make up the most energy supplied to the grid, the price of energy on the commodity market, and consumption history, for example — to predict when the energy supply is cleanest and most cost-effective for powering the app-enabled device.

“It’s an opportunity to make demand match supply,” says Zawacki, a senior developer at Microsoft.

Top image: A new app could maximize renewable energy consumption by suggesting the best time to use electric devices based on demand on the grid and renewable energy output. Image credit: GE Renewable Energy. Above: If the app comes to market, users could download it to any of the growing number of IoT devices, including electric cars, printers, dishwashers, mobile phones, thermostats, washers, smart refrigerators, lamps and laptops. Image credit: Getty Images.

A large number of devices using the BYOD app could also make power companies less susceptible to big swings in demand. Now, for example, electricity use surges on hot summer days around 6 p.m., when people arrive home from work and crank up the air conditioner. The BYOD app could alert ACs to keep the house a little warmer and reduce the spike in consumption. That would make the grid more efficient and cheaper to operate.

The app would also allow energy producers to create what-if scenarios to find ways to smooth out surges in demand on the grid. For example, dishwashers and clothes dryers connected to the app might be told to delay running right before rush hour, leaving more power available for electric vehicles to top up for the ride home. Or the data collected using Predix apps may indicate a temporary drop in electricity costs on a sunny day, so laptops and space heaters might be alerted to charge immediately.

Now if only they could design an app that predicts other types of surges — like one in the stock market.

The post Supply And Demand: An Internet Of Things App Like This One Could Help Bring More Renewables To Your Home appeared first on GE Reports.

One day, when he was still barely a teenager, the film director Steven Spielberg came to visit his father, Arnold, at work. It was the late 1950s and the elder Spielberg was building computers for GE in Phoenix. His designs included a revolutionary machine that a group of computer scientists at Dartmouth College later used to write BASIC, the programming language that revolutionized personal computing. “I walked through rooms that were so bright, I recall it hurting my eyes,” Steven Spielberg told GE Reports about the factory. “Dad explained how his computer was expected to perform, but the language of computer science in those days was like Greek to me. It all seemed very exciting, but it was very much out of my reach until the 1980s, when I realized what pioneers like my dad had created were now the things I could not live without.”

Arnold Spielberg, who turns 101 today, may have been a pioneer, but standing in that bright room in Arizona he was in the dark about many things we consider ordinary today. “At the time I never envisioned anything like the internet,” he said when GE Reports visited him at his bungalow high above Los Angeles.

Surrounded by photographs with President Barack Obama, Hollywood personalities and family, and framed patent certificates — he received 12 patents in total — Arnold Spielberg talked about computers, his love for science fiction and his work on Hollywood blockbusters such as Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar.” What follows is an edited version of our discussion.

GE Reports: When you started designing computers back in the 1950s, the technology was still very new. How did you choose that line of work?

Arnold Spielberg: I was always interested in electricity. I liked working with magnets, and I liked working with radios. I knew about Edison and Tesla, but not in detail. I got my first crystal radio set when I was 9. It’s basically a diode that can detect radio waves, and I played around with it. But I never could get it working until a radio repairman who lived next door helped me set it up.

GER: What else were you building?

AS: Once I saw an Erector Set in a hardware store. I went inside and asked the owner if I could use it to make a steam shovel and put it in the shop window so they could sell more Erector Sets. He grudgingly agreed and I sat in the back every day after school until it was finished. Later, I brought my mom over and showed her what I built. Sure enough, I got the construction set for Hanukkah. But I was also influenced by science fiction. There were twins in our neighborhood who read one of the first sci-fi magazines, called Astounding Stories of Science and Fact. They gave me one copy, and when I brought it home, I was hooked. The magazine is now called Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and I still get it.

GER: How did you end up at GE?

AS: I studied electrical engineering at the University of Cincinnati, and I got my degree in 1949. The first job I had was with RCA. I was designing electronic circuits for missile systems. When they started working on computers, I joined that group. After that, I moved to GE.

I joined GE’s computer department in Schenectady, New York, in 1955. My first job was designing circuits for the first computer process controls. The department was just starting. I stayed at the YMCA and visited my family, which was still back in New Jersey, on the weekends.

Top: Arnold Spielberg at his house in Los Angeles in 2016. Image credit: GE Reports. Above: Spielberg helped build computers that monitored steel mills, steam turbines and other technology. His GE-225 machine even correctly predicted election results. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

GER: Who were the computers for?

AS: The first ones were used for the industrial market. Our customers were paper mills and steel mills like Jones and Laughlin Steel Company in Pittsburgh, Youngstown Sheet and Tube in Ohio, and McLouth Steel in Michigan. They were the first customers ever to have a control system for a hot strip mill.

GER: What did the computers do?

AS: The first computers I built were data-acquisition systems. Their job was to monitor defects. They were a wire-programmed system, which means that they were uniquely designed to do just that job. Another computer called GE-312 monitored a turbine for Southern California Edison. We didn’t dare to control it because that required stops and starts, which could have endangered the machine’s life. The function then was just to make sure that it stayed within specified temperature ranges and that all the contacts were opened or closed as prescribed.

Students and professors at Dartmouth University used a GE-225 machine like the one pictured above to write the first version of BASIC in 1964. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

GER: Tell me about the computer Dartmouth used to write BASIC.

AS: Unlike the previous computers, the GE-225 — as it was called — was a business computer. It stored its own software, handling the input and output of data. We relocated the factory to Phoenix and sold it within GE as well as to the external market. GE used them for general business applications and some scientific work, but mostly to do business processing. I was in charge of the small-computer-systems group, whose job it was to design the circuits, design the logic, plan the system and put it all together.

Arnold Spielberg in 1961. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady

GER: How small was this small computer?

AS: The computer consisted of three racks of equipment. Each rack was 2 feet wide and 7 feet tall. There was air conditioning at the bottom of each rack to cool it off because the circuits ran pretty warm. The memory could range from 8,000 to 16,000 20-bit words. It had an auxiliary memory that could go to 32,000 20-bit words. The computer interfaced with magnetic tapes, with punch cards and punch tapes, among other things.

One of our colleagues, Bill Bridge, designed a computer interface for Dartmouth that could transfer information from the computer to dumb terminals. They had no memory and no capability of doing computation. These were just input and output devices with keyboards. People could connect between 15 to 20 terminals to one computer and use that for time sharing. GE was one of the first companies to do time sharing and allow multiple terminals to talk to a computer.

Dartmouth had one of our computers, and they programmed it to develop the computer language BASIC. It allowed people to use the system to solve problems and handle data coming in out of the computer. Steve Wozniak may have used one such remote terminal to write software for Macs.

GER: Did your friends or family understand what you were doing?

AS: Back then I didn’t have that many friends who were interested in computers. It was like a big mystery to them. My son Steven came to visit once, and I showed him the factory and the engineering floor. I tried to get him interested in engineering, but his heart was in movies. At first I was disappointed, but then I saw how good he was in moviemaking.

GER: You were also involved in movies.

AS: I went to Caltech, and met with the astrophysicists Kip Thorne and Lisa Randall and several other scientists, and we sat there and brainstormed ideas about black holes for the movie “Interstellar.” It was a lot of fun because we kicked around all kinds of ideas about the size of black holes and how feasible they are and how likely there actually may be one.

GER: You didn’t turn Steven into an engineer, but he turned you into a moviemaker.

AS: It’s in the family now.

The post Spielberg 101: Computing Pioneer Talks About GE’s First Digital Blockbuster appeared first on GE Reports.

Nothing embodies the raw power of an offshore oil rig like its “drawworks” hoist. The size of a U-Haul truck, this 6,000-horsepower device can lift drilling equipment weighing up to 3 million pounds out of holes lying in 10,000-foot-deep water. Its six electrical motors can reliably operate for five years straight.

That is except for when they don’t. “Over that period of time, the motors on roughly two or three rigs out of a fleet of 20 will fail prematurely with little warning, and it’s usually when you need the drawworks most,” notes Bernie Wolford, senior vice president of operations at Noble Drilling. In that rare instance of failure, the protocol is surprisingly primitive: Crew members troubleshoot locally, phone onshore experts to discuss findings, follow directions for further troubleshooting, and call back for additional instructions. It’s a routine reminiscent of fixing your mother’s laptop in Florida from your landline in your New Jersey living room.

Such rigmarole will soon become a thing of the past for Noble. The London-based offshore drilling company recently launched the world’s first digital drilling vessel, the Noble Globetrotter I.  This “digital rig” uses data to create virtual versions of some of the key equipment on board. If the drawworks on this newly digitalized rig begins to fail prematurely, for example, information based on a digital twin of that asset will notify a team of experts onshore. Viewing all pertinent data on a dashboard, the onshore team can collaborate with the rig’s crew to plan repairs before a failure.

The technology making all this happen is called edge processing. This new addition to the Industrial Internet teaches machines to think for themselves. Equipment that operates on the “edge” possesses a mini data center that collects and analyzes data and then distributes vital information to the crew and experts onshore. Edge computing is already at work inside self-driving cars, smart elevators, power plants and other machines that need immediate and secure feedback and cannot wait for some remote cloud computer to chime in 30 seconds later. Noble is betting on edge computing to usher in a new age of more efficient, cost-effective offshore drilling.

Above: The London-based offshore drilling company Noble Drilling recently launched the world’s first digital drilling vessel, the Noble Globetrotter I. If the equipment on this newly digitalized rig begins to fail prematurely, information based on the digital twin of that asset will notify a team of experts onshore. Top image: Noble plans to digitalize a total of four rigs by the end of February and ultimately expand that to the remainder of its modern fleet. Images credits: Noble Drilling.

This bold new era begins with taking better care of critical equipment. Noble currently maintains its drawworks by adhering to the manufacturer’s recommended inspection schedule that, according to Wolford, “don’t tell you a lot about the internal condition of the motors.”

But it turns out those motors and the engines powering the ship itself have plenty to share. Comparing data from the hoist’s actual functions with what’s known as a “digital twin,” a virtual model of the device that lives inside the edge processor and can shed light on tiny performance discrepancies human operators may easily miss. Perhaps one engine’s lube oil pressure is gradually trending higher — a problem Noble can easily remedy by changing a filter. As the digital twin receives more data from the edge, it will become increasingly familiar with how equipment behaves, and better able to foresee malfunctions before they occur.

By predicting potential failures as far as two months in advance, Noble could avert breakdowns at sea almost entirely, Wolford says. That would spare the company the expense of replacing equipment, as well as the lost revenues associated with the repair time — a time suck that costs Noble $80,000 to $465,000 daily.

All this efficiency is good news for Noble’s customers, oil companies that spend between $300,000 and $800,000 per day to drill offshore. As Wolford points out: “[Digitalization] bodes well for us in terms of convincing our clients we are the best value for the money.”

Performance data also can motivate human beings to pick up the pace. For instance, one of the most important measurements of productivity on a rig is called the tripping rate. It measures the speed at which drillers put oil pipe into the well and pull it out again and typically accounts for 17 to 22 percent of total well time. Now that the rigs are digitalized, site managers can keep tabs on the tripping rate and other key performance data on iPhone-like handhelds.

That’s because the system, called Digital Rig, runs on Predix, GE’s app development platform for the Industrial Internet. It can pluck out the information pertinent to any given task or employee, then deliver that data in customized packets of information that appear on tidy dashboards on a computer screen or handheld device. This capability means that Noble does not need to transmit unnecessary data from the edge back to shore, via satellite — a good thing considering that service 120 miles at sea is costly.

The Noble Globetrotter I’s digital debut only marks the beginning for Noble’s drilling transformation. The company plans to digitalize a total of four rigs by the end of February and ultimately expand that to the remainder of its modern fleet. While Wolford acknowledges that Noble has yet to translate data into cost savings, he expects operating expenses to drop by May of this year, particularly in maintenance. By 2019, when Digital Rig is running in full force with its kinks worked out, Wolford predicts as much as a 20 percent reduction in operating expenditures associated with targeted equipment.

Ultimately, Noble wants its “smart” rigs to be able to move men farther from the machinery, allowing crew members to operate key aspects of the mighty rigs from the safety of an operational hub rather than out at sea. However, for now, those machines will behave like model students, buckling down and learning everything their Edge processors can teach them.

By predicting potential failures as far as two months in advance, Noble could avert breakdowns at sea almost entirely. That would spare the company the expense of replacing equipment, as well as the lost revenues associated with the repair time — a time suck that costs Noble $80,000 to $465,000 daily. Image credit: Noble Drilling.

The post Digital Ship: Edge Computing Helps Oil Rig Workers Drill Down On Better Maintenance appeared first on GE Reports.

Outside of the Island of Sodor, where Thomas the Tank Engine and his magical friends live, trains don’t usually speak. That’s about to change in Europe, where locomotives are set to start talking to their operators and maintenance crews through data collected from thousands of sensors.

Across Germany, Britain, France and Poland, 250 locomotives run by Deutsche Bahn Cargo (or DB Cargo), the region’s largest rail-freight company, are being retrofitted with GSM connections to transfer information from sensors and failure data. They will work with GE’s Rail 360 Asset Performance Management (APM) Software, which will analyze the terabytes of input streaming in for insights, and make the freight mover smarter.

DB Cargo trains haul almost everything, from raw resources like coal to finished products like cars. But like all rail and freight operators, they sometimes run into unscheduled delays. A locomotive stuck somewhere on the track can get expensive. ”That’s where our solutions come into the game,” says Huschke Diekmann, GE´s general manager for transportation in Germany.

Above: A locomotive stuck somewhere on the track can get expensive. ”That’s where our solutions come into the game,” says GE”s Huschke Diekmann. Image credit: Deutsche Bahn. Top image: Across Germany, Britain, France and Poland, 250 locomotives run by Deutsche Bahn Cargo (or DB Cargo), the region’s largest rail-freight company, are being retrofitted with GSM connections to transfer information from sensors and failure data. Image credit: Getty Images.

Here’s how: Many modern rail freight operators still perform maintenance checkups on a set schedule driven by mileage or time rather than the actual condition of the parts. But DB Cargo is outfitting each of its locomotives with devices to gather data from sensors that will monitor brake performance, motor temperature and other conditions.

This approach doesn’t apply just to trains. The energy and aviation industries, for example, have started looking at digitizing power plants, oil rigs and jet engines, as well, and connecting them to the Industrial Internet. “Every industrial company is going to have to stake its digital claim about how you do a better job with customers, how you drive cost down, and we can lead this,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt told CNBC’s Jim Cramer last year.

The data from the sensors will move to a shoebox-sized “telematics box” in the back of the driver’s dashboard. From there it will travel every couple of seconds to a control center at DB Cargo’s head office in Frankfurt, Germany, and pop up on screens at one of the dozen or so maintenance depots across Europe. Technicians there can then analyze the data with DB Cargo’s prediction system.

By “2020, we want to have 2,000 locos equipped with intelligent diagnostics — an important step to build ‘self-aware’ trains,” says DB’s Matthias Thomas. Image credit: Deutsche Bahn.

The GE part of the system is running on Predix, GE’s platform for the Industrial Internet. DB Cargo can use that information to predict when components such as the brakes or the water tank might need maintenance. The rail operator also gets daily, weekly and monthly reports and advisories on, say, whether the engine coolant level has dropped and what action to take. “In the old days the maintenance depots didn’t have that information available before something happened,” Diekmann says. “The benefit of this Predix APM solution is you have all the prediction available when necessary.”

Mathias Thomas, vice president for asset projects at DB Cargo, predicts that “the locomotives from the project with GE deliver a significant reduction of service failures and thus help us to improve our overall fleet availability.”

Says Thomas: “The cooperation with GE is an essential part of our ‘TechLOK’ system, where already about 900 locomotives deliver data regularly. [By] 2020, we want to have 2,000 locos equipped with intelligent diagnostics — an important step to build ‘self-aware’ trains.”

The post On The Right Track: Software Is Helping Make European Trains Smarter appeared first on GE Reports.

The Swiss-based company SIG is one of the unsung heroes on food’s journey from orchards and fields to your kitchen cabinet.

That’s because SIG makes packaging and machines that box food, drinks, and other products at rapid-fire rates. They can fill 9,000 large cartons, 12,000 medium cartons, or 24,000 smaller cartons with veggies, soups and other foodstuffs in the space of an hour. In 2017 alone, the equipment produced 33.6 billion cartons.

But the company, which has customers in 65 countries, is now taking its game to the next level. Starting in July,  it will will outfit 400 customer factories with two industrial applications from GE Digital— Predix Asset Performance Management (APM) and Predix ServiceMax — to help them track equipment performance and recommend optimal strategies for maintenance. The agreement marks the first time the two applications based on Predix, GE’s platform for the industrial internet, will be deployed in tandem to tend to the overall well-being of manufacturing equipment.

“Think of that old sticker in your car telling you to go to Jiffy Lube for an oil change every six months,” explains Scott Berg, CEO of ServiceMax from GE Digital. “We followed the rules because we didn’t know any better and it sounded scary, but it was a waste of time.” Top and above GIF images credits: SIG.

To put this into context, think of your home heating system — something you rarely consider until it conks out in the middle of January. When you’re sitting in a freezing house, every hour feels like an eternity. The APM software would keep an eye on the boiler to make sure you know when repairs are needed before it breaks. APM would pass that information on to ServiceMax, GE Digital’s field service management software, which would ensure a repair person makes the necessary fixes to keep the heat on — before it goes out.

APM will collect data off sensors on SIG assembly-line equipment to predict problems before they lead to an outage. It also improves equipment productivity by switching from preventive maintenance checks to predictive maintenance. “Think of that old sticker in your car telling you to go to Jiffy Lube for an oil change every six months,” explains Scott Berg, CEO of ServiceMax from GE Digital. “We followed the rules because we didn’t know any better and it sounded scary, but it was a waste of time.” APM acts like a far more complex version of the “wrench sign” on your dashboard — gathering information to determine when it’s time for a tuneup.

All equipment ultimately requires some maintenance. That’s when ServiceMax, kicks into gear, dispatching a service engineer to make the necessary fixes before a machine needs to be taken completely offline for repairs. Additionally, within moments of a service call, SIG field service workers can find out everything needed to fix the problem.

First, the dispatcher can scan each technician’s work history to identify the nearest person with the right skills for the job. Next, he or she lays out a step-by-step guide for execution, even lining up the right spare parts for the technician to bring to the site. When the technician signs into his or her tablet or laptop for work that morning, everything needed to perform the job appears as a daily diary that’s accessible offline — a major benefit given the remote locations of some factories, including those in developing nations.

At day’s end, the technician synchronizes his or her day’s experience back to the software, teaching the machine-learning algorithm even more about maintenance — be it how long the procedure took or any additional tweaks the worker had to make.

Such feedback closes the loop on a virtuous cycle for SIG. Based on past Service Max customer experience, the company could achieve a 13 percent average increase in machine uptime and a 12 percent reduction in repair time. All of this culminates in a 19 percent improvement in productivity — enough to deliver customers to a land of milk and honey.

The post A Recipe For Success: Software And Data Help Food Packaging Companies Go Digital appeared first on GE Reports.

On June 26, GE announced a major change in how we run the company, focusing decision-making in the businesses and empowering our leaders with tools and responsibilities to drive growth and innovation — not from the center but from deep in our businesses.

Our approach to GE Digital is no different and fits closely to that strategy. We were the leader in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and GE Digital is a critical piece of how we solve industrial problems for our customers — by building software and other digital tools for power plants, airlines, hospitals and other industrial customers.

Before customers and business partners started using our technology, GE deployed it inside its factories. Engineers fed data coming off GE machines to smart algorithms and used the insights to drive productivity and improve operations. Today, GE plants around the world are using software to lower power bills, optimize production, reduce inventory and accomplish many other tasks.

As part of our efforts to become leaner and more nimble, we said we would  explore a mix of technical, go-to-market and investment partnerships with GE Digital, such as the partnership recently announced with Microsoft. There may be some noise in this shift, but it is completely consistent with our approach to how we are running the company: business units as the center of gravity controlling their growth plan, which includes digital strategies and using software to make operations more efficient. This operating system will ensure GE is closer to customers and our teams are even more integrated and therefore better able to adapt. Our commitment to digital and supporting our customers with digital applications remains our highest priority.

“The future is digital and GE will play a key role in it,” says GE Chairman and CEO John Flannery. Top image credit: Getty Images. Above: GE Power.

We remain bullish on the IIoT and continue to develop new applications for it. Today, many GE businesses, their customers and outside partners are benefiting from GE’s Predix software and machine-learning tools, using them to drive productivity and increase the efficiency of their operations. They include large power companies like Exelon, Invenergy and New York’s NYPA; the Australian flag carrier Qantas; the Swiss maker of elevators and other equipment Schindler Group; and the Brazilian steel company Gerdau.

An app called FlightPulse, for example, which began as a collaboration between GE and Qantas, shows pilots data from every flight of their airline, including fuel savings and areas for improving fuel efficiency. “FlightPulse was designed by pilots for pilots,” Captain Mike Galvin, head of fleet operations at Qantas, told GE Reports. “It provides pilots with flight data in a very visual way, allowing them to see first-hand the amount of fuel used at different stages of a flight and how they can help to reduce carbon emissions.”

Software is also playing a key role in preparing additive manufacturing — a group of technologies that includes 3D printing — for mass production, allowing engineers to run simulations as they perfect their parts. It’s clear that software remains critical to GE’s future.

Another digital system in the Predix portfolio, called Asset Performance Management (APM), for example, is helping utilities and airlines around the world monitor their turbines’ and jet engines’ health and efficiency, optimize their operations and keep them in service longer. Our Predix platform, coupled with the Predix APM and ServiceMax applications, enables SIG, a Swiss-based maker of food packaging machines, to track equipment performance and recommend optimal strategies for maintenance.

I want to be clear. GE Digital will continue to grow its strong commercial business, focused on both GE and its industrial customers. We see strong long-term growth in our core industries. We also will leverage our partners to pursue the strong digital growth opportunities we are seeing beyond our core industries. The future is digital and GE will play a key role in it.

The post John Flannery: GE’s Long Digital Game appeared first on GE Reports.

GE announced plans today to establish a new independent digital business focused on developing software for the industrial internet of things. This network, also known as IIoT, links machines to each other, to the cloud and also to other devices. It allows human managers to use machine learning software to quickly analyze vast amounts of data and gain new insights to operate their businesses more efficiently.

The yet-unnamed new company will bring together software solutions that include products like GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management, as well as the GE Power Digital and Grid Software Solutions business units. GE said the company will “provide software for asset-intensive industries with a focus on the power, renewables, aviation, oil and gas, food and beverage, chemicals, consumer packaged goods and mining industries.”

The new business will start with $1.2 billion in annual software revenue and an existing global customer base. GE said the company “is intended to be a GE wholly-owned, independently run business with a new brand and identity, its own equity structure, and its own board of directors.”

“As an early leader in IIoT, GE has built a strong business with its industrial customers thanks to deep domain knowledge and software expertise,” said GE Chairman and CEO H. Lawrence Culp Jr. “As an independently operated company, our digital business will be best positioned to advance our strategy to focus on our core verticals to deliver greater value for our customers, and generate new value for shareholders.”

There are many projections for the size of the IIoT market. In 2015, Accenture estimated IIoT could add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

GE said the new company’s independent structure will enable additional outside investment and give employees an opportunity to acquire shares and benefit directly.

GE also announced an agreement to sell a majority stake in ServiceMax, a leading provider of field service management software, to the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. GE said the move will position ServiceMax for continued growth through more focused product development. The transaction is expected to close in Q1 2019, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

The post GE To Launch A Standalone Digital Business, Sell Majority Stake In ServiceMax appeared first on GE Reports.

We are being flooded by data. By one estimate, 90% of all data in existence has been created in the past two years, with business providing a growing share. For some, the data deluge can be daunting. But others, like GE’s Matt Wells, see opportunities, especially in manufacturing. “Many executives say data is the new currency because of all the potential value to be unlocked from it,” says Wells, vice president of product management for GE Digital. “But while most businesses are great at generating data, they’re not great at collecting it, analyzing it and putting its insights into practice.” Right now, some 70% of manufacturing data that’s created simply washes away.

Wells is working to change that. On his latest project, he and the GE Digital team are working with consumer packaged goods giant Procter & Gamble, which has long been keen on wringing insights from data that can help improve its manufacturing processes. As this collaboration unfolds, P&G will become the first company to roll out a new system from GE called Predix Manufacturing Data Cloud, or Predix MDC.

The cloud-based system allows P&G to gather data in real time from dozens of factories around the world, searching it for insights to make manufacturing processes faster. Wells says GE plans to make Predix MDC widely available to manufacturing companies in other industries by the summertime.

P&G is already using GE Digital’s Plant Applications manufacturing execution system (MES). GE’s MES software, relied on by thousands of companies around the world, uses the industrial internet of things to optimize manufacturing machines and processes at individual plants — in short, to make them smarter, which the consulting firm Deloitte says has become an important way for companies seeking a competitive advantage. In fact, about two-thirds of businesses in industrial manufacturing have some form of smart-factory initiative that can enable them to more swiftly respond to customer requests, market demands, and product maintenance and updates.

Predix MDC, which will be made widely available to manufacturing companies in other industries by summer, allows P&G to gather data in real time from dozens of factories around the world, searching it for insights to make manufacturing processes faster. Images credit: Getty Images.

Predix MDC does much the same as a manufacturing execution system. But it works on a global level, providing management with individual factory insights while also aggregating data across locations and business lines.

MDC goes beyond analyzing data, though; it helps improve operations too. Right now, a typical smart factory will generate and store its reams of data locally — eventually leading to lag times in accessing the data and transferring it between machines, physically slowing down production. Think of your annoyance when your smartphone is a bit sluggish to open up your photos. Now imagine you’re running not just an app but an entire production line.

The Predix MDC software speeds up manufacturing by shunting to the cloud what’s called cold data — historical information that has analytical value but isn’t needed for that day’s production. The hot data — required information — stays on-site, while still being backed up to the cloud. As a result, the speed of a manufacturing facility’s data processing is improved by 50%, according to Wells. The cloud environment also lowers factory-level data storage costs, while predictive maintenance enabled by the system helps reduce downtime. Additional benefits come from having a complete data history of product manufacturing off-site, which is useful for regulatory, compliance and auditing needs.

“Most companies are only just scratching the surface of realizing their data’s potential,” says Wells. “Procter & Gamble understands that digital tools like Predix MDC are critical for staying competitive.”

The post Factory Records: GE Providing Procter & Gamble Greater Access To The Cloud For Analyzing Manufacturing Data appeared first on GE Reports.