Building a Better Utility Future with APM

This blog was originally published on LinkedIn.

Change is good. Change is good. That’s the mantra utilities must embrace today while offering reliable and safe service to customers in a rapidly evolving energy industry. One change I’m constantly hearing about is digitalization. In my 16+ years in the industry, I’ve had the privilege to help customers better leverage their asset data and break down the silos keeping them from working at top performance.

At the Connected Plant Conference in Charlotte this month, I had the opportunity to present alongside Nova Scotia Power’s Mike Greene on “Enabling Asset Management through Strategic Use of Data.” The utility’s efforts were even recognized at the conference with a Game Changer Award for its innovation in digitalization.

Nova Scotia Power (NSP) faces many challenges:

•         Aging generation assets (many approaching the 40-year mark)
•         A growing knowledge gap in areas of their workforce
•         Changing generation mix and utilization
•         Increasing stakeholder scrutiny
•         Expectation of transparency by regulatory agencies

Sound familiar? These are top concerns throughout the industry. Hence, the “Change is good” mantra.

NSP standardized management processes, applying real-time analytics to its steam fleet and hydro and combustion turbines. Using Predix Asset Performance Management (Predix APM) solution, the utility uncovered valuable benefits in the deluge of data coming in from their Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system, assets, operator rounds data, and more.

Layering work management, reliability programs, advanced technology, information management, and asset planning into APM offered insights on dozens of aspects including:

•         Outage planning
•         Asset health assessments
•         Fleet monitoring
•         Mobile technology
•         Maintenance strategy
•         Operations logs
•         Outage execution.

Predix APM harnesses data in real-time to gauge criticality and condition against mitigating factors (e.g. risk tolerance) and maintenance strategies, which enables the utility to make data-driven decisions to optimize efficiency. NSP credits GE’s APM solution with time savings, early issue identification, deductive support, and significant cost savings.

Data-Driven maintenance actions with APM

NSP’s accomplishments with APM technology are impressive. But their success story won’t be the only one. Connected Plant brought together industrial operators from all over the globe to talk about how digitalization can increase efficiency, quality, safety, compliance and reduce costs. It was great to share with so many people the many benefits GE can offer in the digital transformation of asset management.

Our digital solutions leverage extensive domain knowledge to help customers realize benefits, like NSP did, with fast time-to-value. Today, APM combines pre-built dashboards, health indicators for assets, maintenance policies, risk analysis, FMEA, predictive analytics and criticality analysis, all focused on intelligent strategies to monitor, maintain, and optimize assets.

Predix APM solution comes with valuable, pre-loaded content drawn from our decades of experience designing, building, and maintaining utility assets. Instead of spending time and effort populating the solution and building maintenance strategies into the tool, customers get a head start with pre-built content coupled with advanced analytics capabilities. 

For example, with pre-built APM, the utility gains a digital twin of its boilers, transformers, pulverizers, turbines, and all other assets. These digital twins include measurement points, health indicators, predictive analytics, FMEAs, risk, criticality, maintenance recommendations and subsequent consolidation of all relevant KPIs into one consolidated dashboard for real-time decision making on assets, resulting in:

•         Reduced maintenance costs
•         Less unplanned downtime
•         Improved asset planning
•         Better asset utilization.

Our partnership with NSP is only one shining example. Working with 208 power plants at 70 power companies and covering 113,735 MW, GE has many customer collaborations to highlight in the IIoT space. More innovation, differentiation and value for customers,  made possible with the deep level of domaine expertise available with GE Digital’s easy-to-implement APM solution is ahead.