OREANDA-NEWS. GE (NYSE:GE) and Pitney Bowes (NYSE: PBI) today announced an alliance to develop customized asset performance management (APM) applications for Pitney Bowes and its Enterprise Business Solutions customers. All of the services will be built on and powered by Predix, GE’s software platform for the Industrial Internet. This will enable Pitney Bowes to analyze data generated from its own production mailing and shipping machines and those of its clients to provide client and productivity services, and job scheduling capabilities that improve business outcomes.

Pitney Bowes clients, such as financial institutions, telecommunications providers, and insurance firms, are producing and mailing hundreds of thousands of transactional and direct mail pieces daily. By combining the physical and digital elements of high-speed production mail operations and leveraging big data analytics, they will gain greater visibility, increased productivity, significant operational efficiencies and more reliable services for their machines.

With applications based on GE Predix, Pitney Bowes will also be able to improve asset performance and drive operational efficiencies for its on-site and on-call service models. The custom-built APM solutions will be designed to help Pitney Bowes proactively identify, diagnose and resolve asset service issues even before the client is aware, reducing and eliminating downtime. The applications will also help Pitney Bowes clients drive machine, personnel, factory site and company-wide operational productivity. These services will provide business opportunity for Pitney Bowes as they offer these applications and their benefits to customers.

“Our partnership with GE will help accelerate Pitney Bowes’ pace of innovation in combining physical and digital solutions to enable commerce. It is an important step in a series of activities we are pursuing across Pitney Bowes as part of our technology strategy. By adding this next generation of data analytics and digital solutions to our hardware products, we will be able to drive more valuable solutions and business outcomes for our clients,” said Roger Pilc, chief innovation officer of Pitney Bowes.

“Predix is the backbone of the Industrial Internet, and to have an established global technology company integrating it into their business is a huge step forward,” added Bill Ruh, vice president of GE Software. “From improving efficiencies to impacting their bottom line, we expect these custom-built applications to have a significant impact on Pitney Bowes’ business by increasing productivity, shrinking downtime and improving the performance of its assets across the board.”

"We see this initiative as potentially transformative to our Production Mail business unit,” said Jason C. Dies, president of Document Messaging Technologies at Pitney Bowes. ”By gathering digital data from production mail machines, Pitney Bowes can drive compelling business outcomes for our clients. The combination of data, analytics and software customized for this environment by GE Predix delivers an innovative competitive advantage for Pitney Bowes and our customers.”

Pitney Bowes initially plans to offer the following applications on the GE Predix platform:

  • Client Services provide insights into asset, application and operator performance that optimize break/fix and preventive maintenance scheduling.
  • Productivity Services with analysis of throughput and other productivity metrics drive machine, operator, and factory productivity and efficiency.
  • Job Scheduling and Capacity Planning provide tools for efficiently planning and scheduling work according to available assets and capacity.

Pitney Bowes and GE are members of the Industrial Internet Consortium working with other IIC members to advance the use and commercial benefits of machine-to-machine and Internet-of-Things technologies. As physical and digital worlds merge, the IIC is defining open interoperability standards and common architectures to connect smart devices, machines, people, processes and data, so organizations can leverage data and analytics from Internet-connected devices to optimize operations and develop innovative new offerings.