Our Future is Digital

This was originally posted on LinkedIn

I wake up every morning knowing that my schedule will be jam-packed until the moment I send my last email that night. Customers and investors want to understand where the company is headed, and the GE team is looking for clarity. I have a lot of decisions to make in my new role as CEO, but one decision is easy: GE is all in on digital.

We have fully embraced the digital industrial transformation, and we believe in its potential to change the world. For our customers, digital is bringing new levels of innovation and productivity— and they are seeing real, tangible outcomes. This is happening in each of our businesses. Now, we are taking these outcomes and transferring what we have learned directly to our customers.

GE is helping lead this transformation because we have the scale, the installed base, and the industrial expertise. We know what works for our customers, therefore we are now able to prioritize what we work on and the investment needed to achieve the best results for customers, and the best return for shareholders. Our strategic focus is on our verticals. We will leverage what we do best in energy, oil and gas, aviation, healthcare, rail, and mining, and draw on our core assets and equipment to deliver the best value and execution. We will broaden and strengthen our partner relationships to create a strong Predix ecosystem.

Most importantly, customers are seeing results

Take, for example, the energy industry. Today, our Predix portfolio supports 4 percent of the world’s power generation. Exelon deployed GE’s entire suite of Predix software applications across their Generation fleet – which delivers 32,700 megawatts of nuclear, wind, solar, hydroelectric, and natural gas power. This has increased Exelon’s performance and reliability, leading to a 1-2 percent boost in annual energy production.

Our Predix Asset Performance Management (APM) and Predix Operations Performance Management (OPM) solutions have reduced asset failures, increased uptime, and improved production capacity – leading to cost savings and efficiencies for customers. RasGas, a liquefied natural gas producing company in Qatar, for example, uses APM to improve the reliability and availability of their critical assets. With GE solutions, they have seen $2.47 million in outage savings; they have increased availability to over 99%; and they have reduced outage duration between maintenance intervals, extending production asset lifetime. Joy Global, a mining company, uses APM to support their life cycle management processes, which helped them achieve 100% ROI in nine months and 115 percent ROI in one year. They continue to grow as implementation is rolled out to other regions.

We are part of this transformation

The company I joined 30 years ago made machines that made the world work better. We are still that company, but the world has changed, and the industrial world is increasingly powered by digital applications. We are part of this transformation, and we have a focused strategy that I believe is best for our customers and for GE. As a result, we have gotten some good feedback from the industry. Analysts view GE as a leader in IOT software platforms, we have a comprehensive APM offering in the market, and we are leading in field service management. So, we are doubling down on what we know works.