Improving the Reliability of the World’s Industrial Equipment

According to the World Bank, unplanned power outages leave homes and businesses in many emerging countries without electricity for 15 or more days per month. In the United States, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) reports that the average power system suffers downtime and is unable to meet demand 6% of the time. At GE Digital, we’re addressing this issue head on by offering monitoring and diagnostics as a service. 

Asset monitoring around the world

Our Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics (RM&D) Center in Atlanta is an industry-leading asset monitoring facility. Our experts at the RM&D Center have more than more than 20 years of experience working with customers to increase uptime while reducing operations and maintenance expenses. Today, more than 500 customers—who produce the electricity used by approximately 400 million people—use the RM&D Center’s data scientists, engineering resources, and monitoring services to identify machine and equipment issues. 

Every day, the RM&D Center receives more than 200 billion data tags coming from one million sensors attached to 5,000 assets in power plants spanning more than 60 countries. In order to scale, the center utilizes Predix Asset Performance Management (Predix APM)-based services to gain a real-time view of customer’s asset data. This enables more effective and collaborative trouble-shooting that allows customers to forecast and prevent power outages through predictive maintenance. 

Asset performance management in the real world

Recently, Kevin Prouty from IDC stopped by our RM&D Center to see Predix APM in action first-hand. During his visit, he was able to learn about how we’re providing turbine and asset monitoring services in real time for our customers. And, that’s not all. Kevin put together his thoughts on the RM&D Center, including the value it provides to our customers and why other industrial companies should take notice of this operations monitoring framework. Below are his key takeaways: 

• Building an operations monitoring center is more than a technology platform
• The monitoring center can help with engineering “brain drain” and retirements
• GE built its RM&D center over 20 years
• No one is going to build it for you. This is an internally driven transformation.  

While the RM&D center may be mainly focused on power generation, the foundation we’ve built in operations monitoring is one that can easily be applied to other industries like chemical manufacturing and steel manufacturing. Read Kevin Prouty’s full IDC perspective report to learn more about how we’re building the most advanced third-party, remote monitoring and asset management operation, supported by a market-leading industrial software application portfolio.