Co-Creating the Future: Part 6 – Innovation in Action

In part six of our Co-Creating the Future series, we explore how GE Digital has enabled digital transformation for three leading industrial companies. This post was originally published on SIG’s SIGnals blog.

In part five of our Co-Creating the Future series with SIG, we looked at our own playbook for digital transformation, designed to help companies start their own digital journey. But what does a successful digital transformation look like? Here, we give a glimpse into the power of our Predix portfolio for some of the world’s leading industrial players.

Swiss company Schindler may not be a household name, but the 142-year-old company is one of the world’s biggest elevator, escalator, and moving walkway companies. Its products haul millions of people every day, and it’s now moving gigabytes of data.

Using Predix Platform, the leading application development platform for the Industrial Internet, Schindler has connected over a million elevators, escalators, and moving walkways to securely analyze its data and help the company take digital monitoring to a higher level.

The data flowing from Schindler’s connected elevators will help the company identify, analyze, and resolve possible service issues before they happen. This predictive analysis helps reduce downtime, lowering the chance of having to walk up a flight of stairs due to an out-of-service escalator or elevator, and even improve design.

As one of America’s leading utility companies, with more than $33.5 billion in revenue and over 32 gigawatts of total generation, Exelon wanted to digitally transform its business. Having accumulated decades of data that it had previously been unable to leverage, the company needed to bring data, people, and analytics together to help realize its digital strategy.

Exelon and GE Digital began working together on ways to achieve the company’s goals using Predix Platform. One of these projects was finding a new and more accurate wind forecasting solution. Exelon and GE Digital took a co-innovation approach to finding a solution by analyzing a year’s worth of historical data to create an industry-leading forecasting application.

The resulting application reduced under-forecasting in real time and also improved day-ahead forecasting accuracy by 9%. This has enabled outage planning so that maintenance can be scheduled when there’s little to no wind, meaning minimal revenue loss.

Cristal, the world’s second-largest producer of titanium dioxide and a leading supplier of titanium chemicals, was faced with the need to meet changing government regulations and standards, and also calculate the risk associated with not doing so.

To meet these challenges, Cristal implemented Predix Asset Performance Management (Predix APM). This helped Cristal engineers see that they needed to better understand plant risk levels, reduce unexpected failures on critical equipment, and implement an inspection plan that used criticality as its basis rather than time.

Predix APM has enabled Cristal to reduce the risk of equipment failures by an estimated £2.12m a year, work towards a 56% reduction in required inspections and save an estimated £3.31m in inspection costs over 10 years.

These are just a few industrial companies that we’ve helped transform, but there are many more.   At GE Digital, we work with over 1000 Predix-powered industrial customers around the world, across all industries. Read more of our customer’s stories here.

Want to know more about SIG’s partnership with GE Digital? Check out this recent blog on the partnership announcement.