The energy industry is well on its way to digital transformation, and GE Digital is positioning itself as a technology supplier that can help accelerate an oil and gas manufacturer’s digital journey as well as their time to value for new applications.
To that end, GE Digital made three announcements during the ARC Industry Forum in Orlando in June, including a partnership with a 3D digital twin software provider; the announcement of the new Accelerator product line designed to quickly configure its Asset Performance Management (APM) software; and the news that GE Digital has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Energy Competency status, which recognizes GE Digital’s ability to help the energy industry prepare for a lower carbon future.
First, GE Digital has formed a partnership with 3D digital twin provider Visionaize that brings high accuracy visualization capabilities to operational use cases as a way to save time, reduce cost, and improve safety, the company said. Visionaize’s V-Suite Starter can be incorporated into GE Digital’s APM Mechanical Integrity software designed to streamline maintenance activities and improve worker efficiency across asset intensive industries.
While industrial companies can choose to review data and information in any number of formats including plant blueprints, piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&ID), and isometrics through CAD/CAM software, V-Suite Starter allows users to view real-time and historical asset data on the 3D model to deliver timely and valuable insights at the point of action. The 3D visualizations of key asset information combine “see it, model it, and understand future behavior.”
Visionaize integrates 3D plant models with APM Mechanical Integrity to provide data-driven visualization of key attributes by color coding the model to filter out noise and focus on what matters most. It dynamically visualizes and contextualizes data for operations and maintenance activities to help asset-intensive companies solve challenges associated with downtime, quicker time to resolution, maintenance costs, and workforce productivity, the company said.In a separate announcement, GE Digital announced the launch of its Accelerator tools which will fast track the time it takes to leverage predictive analytics, asset health and reliability processes, asset strategy optimization, and change management workflows without custom development.
GE Digital’s first set of Accelerators includes an extensive library of predictive analytics, asset management strategies, and standard health and reliability processes. Using advanced pre-built product configurations, companies can efficiently set up enterprise-level asset reliability and performance programs, embedding prioritized actionable information into daily work. In addition, they are designed to scale the power of APM with health monitors, analytics, asset maintenance strategies, and business process workflows.
In addition to GE Digital’s own asset library, the company has partnered with Stork, an asset performance improvement provider, to offer their Asset Strategy Library (ASL,) delivering a collection of pre-defined strategy templates for known failure modes and prescribed mitigating actions for a wide variety of asset types including Balance of Plant (BoP).
“Energy companies have used asset management practices for decades, but today’s operating environment requires that they extend that to even more assets in the plant,” said Tracy Swartzendruber, GE Digital’s VP of marketing for power generation and oil & gas during a press conference. “Accelerators help energy companies expand processes without consuming more time and more resources required on custom configurations.”
Swartzendruber went on to liken Accelerators to the game Minecraft where players can build and create anything. Over time, to avoid custom coding, the game began to productize different textures and sounds, for example, that could be easily applied. “That’s Accelerators. GE Digital deploys so many APM instances and we keep seeing the same things that people need… why not package these things up? They can still customize it, but we give them the head start.”
Lastly, GE Digital’s AWS Competency status was a result of a rigorous technical validation process, including a customer reference audit, resulting in a demonstration of GE Digital’s deep expertise of AWS to build, implement, and integrate technology—using its APM software for power generation and oil & gas—that transforms complex business and operational systems in a way that can accelerate energy and digital transitions.
