Ge Digital Industrial Transformation Playbook Whitepaper
Ge Digital Industrial Transformation Playbook Whitepaper
Ge Digital Industrial Transformation Playbook Whitepaper
Transformation Playbook
Executive Summary
While much has been written about the digital transformation
of industry, few industrial companies have undertaken the
daunting work of actually transforming. GE has and is.
The industrial world has been shaped by a series of The current age of the digital industrial is marked by ever
foundational technology changes over the last 250 years: more powerful software and falling hardware costs. That
steam and rail (1750-1830), electricity and telephone is, today’s predictive algorithms and machine learning
(1880-1920), computer and IT (1960-2000), and the current capabilities enable use cases that were not possible even
era of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and big data five years ago. And let’s not forget the steadily falling cost
(2010-present). of sensors, compute, storage, and bandwidth that has
made the deployment of these capabilities a financial
Each technology change introduced a wave of productivity
reality.
improvements accompanied by market disruption, whereby
some industrial leaders were displaced by the rise of agile The first Industrial IoT use cases focused on reducing
new competitors. Those incumbent leaders that invested in unplanned downtime of key industrial assets such as
new capabilities often retained their market position. power generation machines and mining equipment.
Industrial companies are now aggressively increasing the
GE has survived many such disruptive waves since it first
surface area of instrumented assets beyond just expensive
joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a founding
critical machines. In other words, industrial firms are
member in 1896. The fate of GE’s industrial peers has not
increasing both the number of sensors on each asset as well
been quite as fortunate. Today, GE is the only remaining
as the number of assets with sensors.
member of the 1896 Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The result is not only the ability to develop a high-
resolution view of the future behavior of critical assets,
but also the ability to develop a system view of an
entire enterprise operation. This operational agility and
predictability is giving industrial companies the option to
pursue business model innovation by offering efficiency,
productivity, and virtually everything “as a service.”
Industrial?
comprehensive digital twins and a complete digital thread— fed into our predictive algorithms and machine learning
has been made possible by low-cost innovations. technologies. It was then that a holistic view of operations
began to emerge. It was also then that we started thinking
about the Industrial Internet of Things as much more than
At its core, a digital industrial a technology trend. We began to view it as a foundational
company uses data and analytics to A "digital thread" enables industrial technology that could deliver material value creation and
companies to rapidly refactor operations, sustained competitive advantage.
create a "digital twin" of each of its improve existing offerings, bring new data- The result was that we moved from a defensive to an
key processes and physical assets. driven products to market, and innovate with offensive market position. That is, we pivoted from focusing on
new outcome-based business models. defending our hardware service contracts to moving strongly
This digital foundation enables the into a growth orientation by investing in new capabilities and
company to drive down costs while pursuing new business models.
Platform
Many of our customers and partners are contemplating a GE built Predix because we needed an industrial-strength,
“build vs. buy” decision when it comes to an IIoT platform. edge-to-cloud platform that combined predictive analytics
Many of these firms are surprised to find how expensive it with 3-D models of physical systems, featured a modular
is—in terms of both time and financial resources—to establish architecture of microservices, and that leveraged all of the
the foundational capabilities needed to even begin developing agile development practices that allow industrials to keep
digital industrial solutions. pace with rapid technology innovation. We spent close to four
years just getting the underlying plumbing and commercial
In other words, before you start building applications, you
back-end right. The result is a world-class digital industrial
must take on tasks such as setting up the infrastructure,
platform that customers can scale up and down as market
integrating software stacks, deploying and collecting sensor
dynamics change.
data, managing data and meta data, staffing world-class
software and data science talent, building out industrial-grade With these foundational capabilities in place, customers are
IT and OT security, and defining user models and access. able to rapidly roll-out APM and field service solutions and
accelerate their digital transformation journey.
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Partner Ecosystem
We quickly realized we couldn’t undertake true digital leading technology partners, independent software vendors
transformation on our own. The result is an open-innovation (ISVs), and thousands of developers. To onboard these new
partner ecosystem that spans industrial markets and partners, we vastly simplified our partner program across
industrial outcomes. products, businesses, and geographies. Today, we have one
unifying partner program that features clear partnership
First, we had to change the way we worked with our partners.
tiers for all partners. This single program serves the largest
Like many industrials, GE traditionally had a robust reseller
companies in the world right down to early-stage startups.
and distributor channel. With GE Digital, we opened the
aperture of not only which types of entities could become Perhaps most importantly, our partner program features an
partners but also what types of activities we would do “open-innovation” model, where partner solutions that are
with partners. built on Predix can be certified and made available to the
global GE Digital user base.
Our partner program now features a co-innovation model that
not only includes resellers and distributors, but also includes
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• Deliver results in an uncertain world The final step involved moving our corporate headquarters
to the heart of downtown Boston, one of the world’s most
innovative technology centers.
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About GE
GE (NYSE: GE) is the world’s Digital Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined machines
and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE is organized around a global exchange of
knowledge, the “GE Store,” through which each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets,
structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors.
With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the
language of industry.
Contact Information
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[email protected]
www.ge.com/digital
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Specifications are subject to change without notice. 08 2017