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There are a few themes that are impossible to avoid in business news: resiliency, waste, and the growing role of artificial intelligence. If you work in industry or manufacturing, there are other big ideas - smart factory or facilities, lean, and sustainability. If we want to find a way to have our industrial cake and eat it too (sustain business and the planet), then we need to get digital transformation right. Digitalizing our infrastructure will enable an even bigger market opportunity – the circular economy.
GE Digital is developing software solutions for lean circularity and we are looking for innovation partners! Email Ben Whiteman, Product Manager, Circularity at [email protected] and read-on to explore these critical value drivers.
If we want to reduce our impact on the planet, industry must take the lead. While 25-30% of emissions and waste come from households and individuals, “the vast majority of global emissions (70-75%) can be reduced directly by the decisions of those who run businesses, utilities, buildings, and governments” (Project Drawdown).
The circular economy is more than a sustainability initiative – it’s a transformation framework to help industrial companies make and save money by maximizing the use of resources. Waste in the circular economy is “fugitive” or lost value. There is good news – established manufacturing methodologies like lean are enablers to circularity journeys because they share the common goals of waste discovery and elimination. A majority 68% of industry has already started adopting lean concepts including; Muri (process overburdening), Mura (variability signals), and Muda (waste results) as well as visualization tools like value stream mapping (VSM) to guide systems thinking and streamline stakeholder buy-in. In the white paper, Lean Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Internet, we discuss how GE Digital customers have used our lean-driven software solutions to achieve up to 15% improved labor utilization, 15% reduced work in process, in addition to faster turnaround and production optimization for on-time delivery.
GE Digital is actively developing new lean circularity solutions to help industrial companies start thinking about their waste as valuable inventory. We’ve seen how our inspiring customers are using our Historian, Automation, and Analytics products to capture and create value from waste, as well as meet regulatory reporting requirements. By observing and listening to their feedback, we are driven to help companies unlock value and reinvest in continuous improvement for their business while benefiting society.
As industrial companies continue down this path, they’ll need digital solutions that can support their business and operating models – which is why digital transformation is so important. Smart factory technology combined with lean culture are driving the future of waste elimination and circular industry.
Thanks to GE’s history of success in serving diverse industrial sectors with both hardware and software for optimizing operations, GE Digital’s software solutions are smart enablers for industrial companies on a digital transformation and lean circular journey. Building on interviews and the success of customers leveraging our existing products, we have identified three problems worth solving to focus our circular innovation efforts:
With 73% of consumers willing to change their behavior, enterprises are acting. A true circular economy is some way away, but GE Digital has the tools needed to get there. Adopting smart factory technologies is an important step on the lean circularity journey. For the resiliency of our environment, societies, and bottom lines, utilization of smart factory solutions for lean circularity is the greatest industrial opportunity of our time.
Email Ben Whiteman, Product Manager, Circularity to join us in building a world that works.
Reach manufacturing excellence through Industrial IoT insights and intelligence.
Industrial analytics software that optimizes asset and process performance.
A partner in the full deployment of GE Digital’s industrial applications.