GE Finds Manufacturing Value from Day-to-Day Data 

Although the use of predictive analytics for manufacturing continues to drive IT further into factory floors, Jim Walsh, general manager of GE Intelligent Platforms warns that without a proper foundation, manufacturers won’t see the return they were hoping for.

“We’re in perhaps the most transformational time in industry that we’ve ever been in,” explained Walsh last week at GE’s Connected World conference in Chicago. While he refers to the promise that data can deliver, the challenge as he sees it comes down to making that promise a reality.

“Everybody wants to start too far up the continuum,” Walsh says of many manufacturers. “They want the change-the-world analytics. But you need to lay the foundation. That’s not as sexy as the analytics that have an impact on your balance sheets.” However, “If you have the foundation set up, your ability to accelerate up that value continuum increases exponentially.”

Meanwhile, Brian Courtney, general manager of industrial dat intelligence for GE’s software and services business is saying the same. “You can’t really cheat,” said Courtney. “You can’t optimize the process if you don’t know what’s wrong.”

Instead, manufacturers need to focus on learning to walk before they run to improve stability, reliability and uptime. And a part of this is integrating analytics tools into the core of factory workflows, such as teaching a machine operator to trust numbers rather than his own instincts to predict when a machine is going to break. “If you can’t get him to take action, predictive analytics is useless,” says Courtney.

“They have to trust the analytics more than their own brains,” Courtney says. “To get to predictive analytics, that’s a big step.”

While not all catches such as this guarantee big savings, Courtney warned not to underplay the importance of smaller issues. With only five percent of the data GE gathers relating to these high-priority matters, the rest goes into giving companies early warning to repair machinery in a way that’s most cost effective for them. “Uptime is the key factor,” Courtney says. “The value is not in the big catch, but in the day-to-day stuff.”

“We’re finding problems further and further into the future. As you get closer to asset health, the problems get smaller and smaller,” Courtney says. But if customers don’t shift their focus to the small things, he says the costs will be much higher.