Transforming How Industry Solves Its Toughest Challenges by Putting Industrial Data to Work

Pat Byrne is the Chief Executive Officer, GE Onshore Wind.  He previously served as CEO, GE Digital. This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

GE Digital in Q1 2020

Before I summarize our Q1 activities, I want to talk about our purpose.

Our purpose at GE Digital is to transform how industry solves its toughest challenges by putting industrial data to work. That purpose is stronger than ever in this period when businesses are disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

GE Digital is focusing on navigating ‘the new normal’ by keeping our employees safe, adapting how we work and serving our customers. Although there are business disruptions currently, as our CEO Larry Culp said in our Q1 Earnings call, “There Will Be Another Side.”

Last week, I wrote on LinkedIn about how GE Digital has responded to the pandemic over recent weeks – by enabling our customers to support their employees with Remote Monitoring and Operations software.

In addition to being able to provide continuity of service to customers through these digital innovations, we have also seen improvement in results. On one project, we accelerated delivery by one month by using remote working solutions instead of coordinating face to face.

We think that for many customers, digitally enabled remote work will become the new normal.

Our customers provide the mission-critical services keeping the lights on, essential goods on our shelves, and water flowing.

So, I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of the meaningful progress we have made at GE Digital in the first quarter:

• Our GE Digital Grid software teams embarked on new relationships with Xcel Energy, Kuwait Ministry of Electricity and Water and KESCO, the Kanpur Electricity Supply company.

• Our Manufacturing and Digital Plant teams welcomed industrial gasses company Praxair (Linde) among our new manufacturing customers.

• Our Power Generation / Oil & Gas team celebrated success with Algerian power generator SPE (a Sonelgaz subsidiary) and SIPCHEM, a global petrochemicals company.

• In addition to these new customers, we shared several significant customer success stories, including chemicals company Neste, automotive giant SAGW and water utility, the City of Haverhill.

As the impact of COVID-19 was becoming much clearer, we announced our first offer of free remote monitoring licenses to our iFIX and CIMPLICITY clients – enabling utilities and factories to keep operating while their teams worked from home.

Earlier in the quarter we made other significant announcements. Continuing a commitment to innovation in Digital Plant technologies for manufacturers and utilities. These include the new release for Proficy Operations Hub - a “no code” analytics tool for plant workers which aggregates operational data from multiple sources, and allows users to ‘drag and drop’ analytics to build their own applications.

We launched an update for CIMPLICITY 11 and TRACKER 11, our popular MES solutions used by leading customers in process industries like consumer package goods, automotive, life sciences and pharma. It’s great for companies aiming to boost operator efficiency while reducing regulatory and supply chain risks.

In October 2019, we announced our pivot to an industry focused organization, focused on solutions for specific target segments.

During Q1 2020, we named Linda Rae as the General Manager for our Power Generation and Oil & Gas team and Richard Kenedi as the new General Manager for our Manufacturing / Digital Plant team. Jim Walsh leads our Grid software business as General Manager, focused on the utilities and telecom industries. 

We also named Betsy Bingham to lead our Lean Transformation and Operations and Anslem Wong as our new CFO. Patric McElroy leads our Engineering team, Katherine Butler is our General Counsel, and Kathleen McCarthy is the CHRO. 

More recently, we named Colin Parris, formerly from GE Research, as GE Digital’s Chief Technology Officer.

I couldn’t be more excited and proud to be working with such a talented and dedicated group of executives.

We are making progress building a lean culture across GE Digital. We are already seeing promising results for customers as our teams begin to use lean principles as part of their daily management.

For example, at a recent Kaizen event for our Grid software teams we focused on defining how to reduce project cycle time while ensuring we deliver value to our customers quicker and with higher quality.

Our target was to reduce project delivery by more than 150 days. After the four-day Kaizen event, our team left with a roadmap that exceeds this goal significantly. It will be a blueprint to use with other customers going forward.

COVID-19 has been with us for many weeks now and we are living in the “locked down” phase, ensuring we are abiding by social distancing and other important public health guidelines. That’s the priority - safety first.

We are now beginning the next phase of managing through the pandemic – planning for the re-opening of business. This will occur over many weeks and will depend upon local conditions, continued discipline and additional provisions, like expanded testing.

We will enter a “new normal” where we are testing the waters and ensuring we don’t have a setback. But it will be the beginning of a recovery and that’s progress.

Talking to customers and colleagues, I get a sense that all of us are looking forward to moving forward – at the right time and in the right way. Some things will not go back to pre-COVID so soon.

We believe the role that industrial software has played and will continue to play in the future will be very important. In fact, it will grow over time.

In the short-term it has allowed operators in critical industries to remain up and running – manufacturing, power generation, utilities, telecom networks, the oil and gas industry. As we enter the next phase of the pandemic, we will continue to focus on our employees’ safety and serving our customers. 

As those needs evolve, we will adapt and use our tremendous talent and technology to solve industry’s toughest challenges by putting industrial data to work.

My thanks to the entire GE Digital global team for their hard work and dedication and to our incredible customers who are keeping their businesses up and running through the dynamic challenges created by this pandemic.