A Time for Industrial Superheroes: GE Digital User Conference 2020 – Day 1 Recap

Welcome industrial superheroes!

Today has been an incredible day of learning from each other, celebrating success, and exploring our future vision.

As Pat Byrne, CEO, GE Digital, noted in his opening keynote every business leader has shown incredible determination and commitment these past few months during a global pandemic. We know it has not been easy, but we’re grateful to be partnering with our customers in the mission of building a world that works.  That commitment to our customers is unwavering.

As Pat shared, we’re focused on exceptional implementation, an unhindered ability to scale, and showing up for our customers— always. We hope you are feeling that commitment comes across the User Conference and beyond.

Our Virtual Exhibit Hall opened with more than 30 product exhibits and is the perfect place for attendees to see the latest product features and updates. Visitors will find product demonstrations, video presentations, and live networking forums hosted by GE Digital product experts.

Enough about us, let’s talk about the amazing customers we’re lucky to serve.

We’d like to start by congratulating our 2020 Digital Innovator Award Winners. Each of these winners is doing truly remarkable things within their organizations and across their industries.

Future-Ready Award – Sonelgaz (SPE)

SPE is a power generator that serves more than 10 million customers in North Africa. Their investments in remote monitoring and commitment to digital transformation have led to best-in-class maintenance cost management.  

Excellence in Manufacturing Award – Procter & Gamble

One of the largest consumer packaged goods companies in the world, Procter & Gamble must wrangle enterprise-scale manufacturing data for both process and discrete environments. Employing a centralized data approach has improved performance, reduced costs and provided a foundation for analytics and optimization across the enterprise.   

Visionary Award - Suncor

Canada's largest integrated energy company, Suncor, was burdened by legacy systems, lack of efficiency and siloed applications that weren’t coordinating with each other. Their 4.0 vision for digital transformation has focused on operational excellence, capital discipline and sustainability leadership.

Reliability & Resiliency Awared – Florida Power & Light (FPL)

FPL is a state utility that generates, transmits, distributes and sells electric energy to 10 million customers. The need to transition to new ways of working while maintaining  high-quality service to customers was paramount. We recognize them for managing mission critical systems with employees working from home using remote collaboration tools.

Excellence in operations – New York Power Authority (NYPA)

A few years ago the largest state power organization in the United States, NYPA, faced a pending crisis. They needed to keep power stable, while protecting employees. To overcome this challenge, they built a state-of-the-art operations center, and then COVID-19 hit. The need to shift operations from its Integrated Smart Operations Center to remote operations in a very short timeframe. Using laptops as their only tools, analysts and managers were able execute from home tasks that are usually performed onsite at the monitoring center. 16 power plants and more than 1,400 circuit-miles of transmission lines remained safely serving the community.

Digital Transformation Award  - Air Asia

Malaysia-based pioneer, Air Asia, offers low-cost travel in Asia, flying over 390 routes across 22 countries. Like all airlines, this customer has had to respond to the ever changing aviation landscape, including the impact of COVID-19. Leveraging the latest technologies in automation, big data analytics, predictive  maintenance,  machine learning  and artificial intelligence  to become an industry leader in 4.0 digital  transformation.

Across all five industry tracks attendees heard incredible stories of transformation including these:

Gil Quinones, President & CEO at New York Power Authority, shared the journey they’ve been on from an aging system with transformer failures, to the resilient digital leader they are today – producing clean, safe, reliable energy. Together with GE Digital they monitor 115,000 data points, using digital twin technology to predict risk and take action. 

Kris Killinger II, Engineering Advisor at Exxon Mobil shared their two-decade journey which began before the term Digital Transformation had even taken off. Working in collaboration with the GE Digital team, Kris found ways to utilize Exxon Mobile specific models, without heavy product customizations that are difficult to maintain.

The dynamic duo Tim Rogers, Chief Architect for Manufacturing Services and Beth Scheid, Associate Director Information Technology, Global Business Services at Proctor and Gamble shared the deep commitment they have made during this difficult time. Their products include cleaning supplies, toiletries and personal care items in high demand. It was critical they maintain quality while meeting spiked demand. That meant keeping every line operating every day without sacrificing quality – 2000+ manufacturing lines, across 101 plants, employing 45,000 operators. Centralized data was critical, but it had to be done in a way that would honor the unique constraints and opportunities of each local plant. Their story proves digital transformation can happen in stages and still get significant value.

Marcus Gibertson, Manager of Predictive Maintenance Engineering, American Airlines has one important measure of success – no flight disruptions. The more data they were able to share, the more the business wanted.  He shared their path from summary data to detailed insights proving once again that data visualization offers big value to organizations.

These were just a taste of what was shared.  Check out our recap from Day 2 of our event.  And, don't forget to visit our User Conference highlights page.  We've packaged up some of that fantastic content for you to explore.