Aviation
GE’s Flight Efficiency Services are using the power of the Industrial Internet to help its customers make significant savings. For example, GE has been collaborating with the airline Alitalia since 2011 in using data to identify and realize fuel efficiencies. By providing project implementation support, and automated reporting and analysis of daily fuel usage GE helped Alitalia identify 1.5% savings in its fuel costs within the first year – a saving of $15 million. Alitalia has gone on to save a total of Euro 34M ($46M) in fuel savings since the program began.
Electrical Transmission and Distribution
With Grid IQ™ Saas, municipal and co-op utilities can now receive the value of grid modernization without the high capital upfront cost of technology or the hassle of integrating disparate software applications. It reduces the complexity of implementation and delivers results in an accelerated time frame. Grid IQ Saas gave the City of Leesburg the full functionality of an intelligent grid in a fourth of the time and at 10 percent of the full capital cost, reaping benefits that will dramatically improve operations and lower costs.
Healthcare
A capacity-constrained New York facility faced increasing patient volumes, so to meet demand, they needed visibility to overall patient flow, wait times, bed requests and admissions/discharges. GE’s Hospital Operations Management solution helped them treat more patients by creating a 41 percent increase in unit-to-unit transfers, a 30 percent increase in day surgery admissions and an 11 percent increase in emergency department admissions.
When a South Carolina healthcare facility monitored hand washing via a monthly “secret shopper” process, they were only able to observe 700 occurrences in a year. After installing GE’s Hand Hygiene solution, they improved compliance by 29 percent within eight weeks, and they increased recordings from 700 per year to 5,000 per day.
Manufacturing
GE's Proficy software solution has helped Dutch baked goods manufacturer Bolletje improve quality, gain better line of sight into inventory, and leverage traceability of its products from the bakery to the store. The solution also provides more visibility into the actual use of raw materials to improve materials planning, and deeper understanding of material costs for each product line for better planning and deepen understanding.
Mining
One of the largest global mining companies initially deployed Proficy MaxxMine on haul trucks in a mine in Australia. Because it saw quick results, the company decided, within six months, to expand the solution to the remaining mines in its Australian operations. After increasing fleet availability from 70 percent to 85 percent in Australia, the company is now expanding the solution to mines in Africa and South America.
Oil & Gas
GE is working in partnership with BP to ensure the efficient operation of critical rotating machinery on the energy company’s production facilities. Using GE’s System1™ and SmartSignal™ software along with expert support from GE’s monitoring centers around the world, BP remotely monitors machinery from its Advanced Collaborative Environment (ACE) center in Aberdeen and is able to harvest and manage large volumes of data from sensors installed on its offshore machines. This allows BP to identify the early onset of abnormal operating conditions, minimize disruption and avoid unnecessary periods of down time that often result in lost production or increased costs.
Power Generation
With GE’s FlexEfficiency Advantage Advanced Gas Path, Smith Energy Complex is improving their site's output by 16 megawatts, as well as increasing fuel efficiency by more than 1 percent. These improvements help them extend the plant's parts life and increase the time between scheduled outages.
KOSPO, South Korea’s largest utility, worked with GE to optimize the performance of six existing GE gas turbines using GE’s FlexEfficiency Advantage Advanced Gas Path solution. The upgrade improved output by 130 megawatts (MW), plus reduced NOx from 20 ppm to 9 ppm. The additional capacity is also playing an integral role in ensuring the region’s grid stability by elevating its reserve power margin, which had dipped as low as 4 percent during peak demand periods.
Rail
Norfolk Southern estimates that every 1 mph increase in train speed saves as much as $200 million in annual capital and operating expenses. GE is fueling the effort through software and predictive analytics to enable real-time movement planning and optimization on 22,000 miles of the Norfolk Southern network (1500+ trains a day).
Aurizon, Australia’s largest rail freight operator, is partnering with GE and SolveIT to optimize traffic for its complex rail network. This comprehensive solution delivers real-time train optimization, visibility of plan versus actual performance, and predictive modeling for supply & demand optimization.
Water
The R.C. Harris Filtration Plant, which produces nearly half of Toronto’s drinking water, sought to increase efficiency by fully automating its water treatment and analysis. The plant implemented Proficy HMI/SCADA – iFIX software, a market-leading supervisory monitoring and control software, to communicate with a series of GE programmable logic controllers. The integrated and scalable SCADA system was implemented gradually while the plants were in full operation. The complete overhaul included Toronto’s three other water treatment facilities that draw water from Lake Ontario to treat a total of 2.27 billion liters of water per day.