GE Digital Asset Performance Management (APM) Leads in Reliability and Integrity

Condition monitoring, maintenance optimization, risk avoidance, and engineering principles are not going anywhere. However, the Asset Performance Management (APM) market has been changing fast. In our recent webinar with analyst firm Verdantix, we discussed what GE Digital is doing today to garner top scores in the Verdantix Green Quadrant, what we have added to our portfolio since the rankings came out, and our path forward to support Energy Transition.

As part of our hour-long webinar, which you can view below, we rooted ourselves in the history of APM. Below, you can see a simple maturity model that tells the story of how APM has expanded from asset-level usage all the way to multi-facility (or enterprise) deployments. At GE Digital, it's imperative for our customers and the market to understand that we have the capabilities to support at any part of a journey. Whether you're monitoring assets to increased decarbonization efforts like Sorgenia, or using APM across all parts of your business like Suncor, GE Digital can provide the expertise and flexibility to develop the right program.

With so much potential to give an operation reduction in O&M spend and ability to decrease risk, it is no wonder that APM has caught the attention of executive leadership teams. No longer are reliability or integrity programs left up to individual teams, but instead considered in the overall Enterprise Architecture of an operation. According to a Verdantix survey of 256 APM practitioners, 85% of respondents identified a push from executive leadership as a cause for new investment in APM software. The assumption can also be made that the same leaders have an interest in adopting new digital technology to move the operation into a new stage of growth and resilience.

The issue, like in any software market, is how can leaders fight through the noise to find the right solution? Reports like the Green Quadrant are a good start, as well as Total Economic Impact Reports from Forrester, but at the end of the day buying decisions come down to: Dollars, cents, and a shared alignment on the future of an organization. With all of that to consider, noise becomes louder than ever.

To ensure that we are actively listening and acting on what our customers are saying, GE Digital spent a good portion of 2022 building out a Technology Partner ecosystem that combines our leading APM solution with 4 high-powered partners with a common vision. Here is the work we have done, for you:

1. Strategically Align with Amazon Web Services (AWS): in the world of software everyone is familiar, at least at a high-level, what AWS brings to the table. For us the vision of AWS to reduce carbon footprint via cloud computing and generate infrastructure for energy organizations created a mutual interest in partnering. To accelerate our position in Verdantix’s Green Quadrant, we joined AWS’ Energy Competency and have begun to re-imagine the future of APM in the cloud. With expertise in data integration, analytics and scale—AWS and GE Digital give our customers a lot to look forward to.

2. Add TrendMiner Process Analytics to our Leading Asset Analytics: TrendMiner, a SoftwareAG company, provides self-service process optimization to industrial organizations across the globe. Without the need for data scientists, TrendMiner works alongside APM to optimize critical processes to save you time and money. Meanwhile, GE Digital’s APM can monitor your assets, giving an operation near full-coverage with analytics to help optimize production.

3. Bring you closer to your assets with Visionaize: To help further minimize asset downtime and increase worker safety, GE Digital has implemented Visonaize 3D Digital Twin modeling in our Mechanical Integrity solution. By taking real-time and historical data into context, APM can now actively address risk, corrosion, and thickness concerns faster than ever.

4. Getting you to ROI, faster, with Stork: As an expansion of GE Digital’s Accelerator Library, stork delivers expert-created templates with defined risk built in. This gives customers the ability to quickly deploy and scale within APM Strategy across: rotating, mechanical, electrical, safety, and control systems.

The strategy of partnering does not mean that we are investing less in our core APM solutions, it means that we are working hard to build an ecosystem of experts with great technology that we can get into your hands faster.

And now here we are, speaking of noise from the market. Looking into the APM space, similar conversations are being had. Similar value. Similar return. So, why GE Digital? In order to actually drive value with partner technology and innovation, there needs to be a modernized back-end that allows for data to be captured, moved, and actioned. Below, we have provided a high-level look into the foundation that allows us to use your data to give more value. Whether you are using one GE application, or all of them, it is difficult to make the case to invest unless you are entirely sure you will get return. With GE Digital APM, users get access to the ability to integrate an EAM/CMMS system, connect to any historian, and access direct sensor data. Then, with queries or policies, that data can be directed to your APM applications in near-real time to allow your team to make the right decisions.

What you also can see from the above graphic, is that data in APM can flow bi-directionally. This means that data collected by APM Applications can also be directed back into your EAM/CMMS or historian. By removing the need to replicate data manually and move to another system, this is done for you, saving you valuable hours each year for end users.

To wrap up the webinar (playback below), Vipin Nair (Product Manager) provided the audience a view into where GE Digital is heading to solve for the energy transition as well. Not only will investment be made into our leading APM software, we will also be investing into Incubation programs to create the next generation of software for energy organizations. You can expect more news around these programs throughout 2023 and beyond.

Check it out below.