GE Digital Releases APM Solution to Help Industrial Companies Reduce Unplanned Downtime

GE Digital released the newest version of its Asset Performance Management (APM) solution, an offering that combines the GE Digital APM portfolio with the solution offered by Meridium, acquired by GE in September 2016.  This combined solution gives asset-intensive organizations visibility into their assets’ status and health across the enterprise, providing analytics to help avoid unplanned downtime.  GE will showcase this Predix-powered offering at Germany’s Hannover Messe 2017.

Asset-intensive companies seek solutions that help to reduce operating risk and improve reliability at the lowest sustainable cost by predicting and preventing asset failures.  In addition, organizations must enable compliance with ever-expanding regulatory requirements, protect the health and safety of their workers, and provide the tools to make them more productive.

The new GE Digital APM suite reportedly helps to solve these challenges by covering a spectrum of APM services from risk assessment and asset strategy development through condition-based maintenance (CBM), predictive maintenance, reliability centered maintenance, root cause analysis, and inspection and compliance management.  The suite also helps to facilitate the development of asset strategies that help to increase reliability and availability, minimize costs and reduce operational risks, and reduce unplanned downtime by predicting equipment issues before they occur.

While outcomes vary by customer type, GE’s APM offering helps equipment operators to better optimize asset performance to help decrease spending on unnecessary and unplanned maintenance.  Additionally, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have the capability to help reduce asset lifetime costs and increase profit streams from asset service by expanding monitoring and maintenance capabilities to their end customer.  This capability helps OEMs to increase service revenue and reduce asset lifecycle costs, including R&D, warranty and services. 

The GE Digital APM suite consists of the following solutions:

• Machine & Equipment Health – Near real-time equipment health and state. Analytics/Rules engine, configurable dashboards and exception-based notifications of potential issues.
• Reliability Management – Predictive monitoring of equipment issues via digital twins.  Collaboration and knowledge management tools aimed to help improve worker efficiency.
• Compliance and Integrity Management – Help to ensure asset integrity and compliance by monitoring changing risk conditions.
• Asset Strategy Optimization - Tools and techniques to help optimize asset strategies across availability, reliability, risk and costs.

Keywords: Risk Assessment, Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM), Predictive Maintenance, Reliability Centered Maintenance, Root Cause Analysis, Compliance Management, ARC Advisory Group.