6 New GE Digital Industrial Software Solutions From Minds And Machines 2017

On The Path To Digital Transformation

GE Digital on Tuesday revealed it is expanding its suite of edge-to-cloud technologies as the company unleashes new solutions to help industrial companies digitize their workflows.

The company, during its Minds and Machines conference in San Francisco this week, introduced Predix Edge technologies, a new Predix partnership with Azure, new operations performance management software, and field service management solutions, among other things.

"The company that designs, builds, operates, maintains and services industrial assets is best equipped to help others with their industrial IoT journeys," said Bill Ruh, Chief Digital Officer of GE and CEO of GE Digital, in a statement. "Only GE offers the combination of industrial apps, underpinned by an industrial platform, to ultimately drive customer outcomes."

Following are the top six new offerings announced at Minds and Machines 2017.

Expanded Predix Edge Capabilities

GE Digital is expanding its edge capabilities around its Predix industrial IoT platform as the company aims to help manufacturers run analytics "as close to the source of data as possible."

Predix Edge helps customers monitor and analyze data in situations where they may have limited connectivity, latency limitations, regulatory or other constraints. The company has specifically released Predix Edge Manager, which allows customers to support large fleets of edge devices up to 200,000 connected devices from a single console. GE Digital has also released Predix Machine, a feature that allows microservice-based applications to run at the edge on customers' virtualized data center infrastructure or on server-class hardware from GE or its partners.

Finally, GE Digital revealed a new solution call Predix complex event processing, which allows for "faster and more efficient analytics and other event processing at extreme low latency." This feature will be available in the first quarter of 2018, according to GE Digital.

Predix Platform On Microsoft Azure

GE Digital and Microsoft are combining the GE Predix industrial IoT platform with Microsoft Azure's services. The partnership deliverables, available in North America starting in the fourth quarter of 2017 – and expanding globally in 2018 – extends the accessibility of Predix across Microsoft's product footprint. With the partnership, Microsoft and GE Digital are combining advanced developer and data services and hybrid capabilities to help customers better capture data from their industrial assets. GE Digital hopes the partnership will help businesses connect IT systems with their operational systems.

New Operations Performance Management Solution

GE Digital revealed a new Operations Performance Management solution to help industrial companies increase their revenue to "optimize the throughput of industrial processes and make their industrial sites more profitable."

The new solution uses real-time data, historical data and advanced analytics to help industrial customers make better operational decisions by providing an early warning if industrial processes deviate from planned operations. The software will target the mining industry and will expand to additional industries next year, according to GE Digital.

GE Digital said that using its Operations Performance Management solution, a large mining company could achieve up to a 5.5 percent increase in throughput while consuming 2 percent less power.

Enhanced Field Service Management Solutions

GE Digital has made several enhancements to its ServiceMax field service management suite.

The suite now includes a new application integration solution that enables service providers to share field service management data with third-party mobile applications that are installed on the same device. In addition, customers can optimize their scheduling systems for field service management so they can schedule dependent jobs between work orders for multiple visits.

GE Digital said the enhancements will enable greater efficiencies and bring advanced analytics to service operations.

Predix Studio

GE Digital introduced Predix Studio, a development system that helps companies build and scale their industrial applications and simplify the development process.

Predix Studio, which will be available in the first quarter of 2018, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the workload behind creating industrial IoT apps, so that app development becomes more seamless and easier for operational technology operators with domain expertise – but no coding experience.

Digital Twin Analytics Workbench

GE Digital announced it has created a Digital Twin Analytics Workbench as more industrial companies adopt digital twin solutions – which essentially creates a digital version of a physical asset to help predict and improve the performance of physical machines.

The workbench solution applies a library of algorithms and templates to make it easier for companies to build their own digital twins on Predix. The Analytics Workbench is currently a technology preview from GE Power, and can also be used to augment existing digital twins with new data streams.