OREANDA-NEWS. GE Digital (NYSE:GE) today debuted the newest version of its comprehensive Asset Performance Management (APM) solution, an offering that combines the GE Digital APM portfolio with the world-class solution offered by Meridium, acquired by GE in September 2016. This combined solution gives asset-intensive organizations visibility anytime, anywhere, into their assets’ status and health across the entire enterprise, arming them with powerful analytics to help avoid unplanned downtime. GE will showcase this Predix-powered offering next week at Germany’s Hannover Messe 2017.

Asset-intensive companies strive to reduce operating risk and improve reliability at the lowest sustainable cost by predicting and preventing asset failures. In addition, organizations must enable compliance with ever-expanding regulatory requirements, protect the health and safety of their workers, and provide the tools to make them more productive.

The new GE Digital APM suite, the most comprehensive in the industry, helps solves these challenges by covering the full spectrum of APM services from risk assessment and asset strategy development through condition-based maintenance (CBM), predictive maintenance, reliability centered maintenance, root cause analysis, and inspection and compliance management. The suite also facilitates the development of asset strategies that maximize reliability and availability, minimize risk and cost, and dramatically reduce unplanned downtime by predicting equipment issues before they occur.

"APM is all about visibility to equipment health and optimization of maintenance with a goal of reducing the long-term cost of ownership, safety to workers and the environment, and minimizing disruptions to operations," said Eddie Amos, General Manager of GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management software group. "GE’s APM solutions help companies increase asset reliability and availability while reducing cost and risk in operations. And we’ve tested our APM capabilities on our own equipment in our customers’ plants. Because GE is an OEM, we monitor more than $1 trillion in assets. We know what it takes to monitor real industrial equipment and will continue to invest in APM solutions that work for us and work for industry."

While outcomes vary by customer type, GE’s APM offering helps equipment operators optimize asset performance to increase reliability and availability, minimize costs and reduce operational risks, and decrease spend on unnecessary and unplanned maintenance. Additionally, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have the capability to reduce asset lifetime cost and increase profit streams from asset service by expanding monitoring and maintenance capabilities to their end customer. This capability helps OEMs increase service revenue and reduce asset lifecycle costs, including R&D, warranty and services. GE customers are already seeing positive outcomes using the APM offering.

These results come from GE’s control-to-cloud coverage and remote monitoring and diagnostics capability. These software models analyze and simulate real-world conditions to predict how equipment or a process will behave in order to more effectively manage cost and risk. Future integrations with the recently acquired ServiceMax will help industrial customers act on intelligence from the APM solutions and deploy services appropriately.

With predictive capabilities, the OEM can quickly respond to parts and service needs as well as provide timely, critical remote support, which decreases the costs associated with on-site engineering visits. GE’s APM solution also makes it easy to collect, organize, and analyze equipment health information from customer equipment to predict equipment issues and mitigate them before they happen – increasing customer satisfaction (and service contract renewal rates), while lowering warranty and service costs.

This technology helps OEMs address issues while they are small and easy to fix – and makes them better prepared for the likely issues before deploying resources on a service call (i.e. the right parts for repairs on the first visit rather than requiring a follow-up visit), decreasing cost to service. The solution also delivers near real-time equipment health and usage insights to accelerate the product development cycle.

The GE Digital APM suite consists of the following solutions:

Machine & Equipment Health – Near real-time equipment health and state. Analytics/Rules engine, configurable dashboards and exception-based notifications of potential issues.

Reliability Management – Predictive monitoring of equipment issues via digital twins. Collaboration and knowledge management tools aimed to improve worker efficiency.

Compliance and Integrity Management – Ensure asset integrity and compliance by monitoring changing risk conditions.

Asset Strategy Optimization - Tools and techniques to help optimize asset strategies across availability, reliability, risk and costs.