How APM will revolutionize IoT

I joined GE Digital a few months ago and have spent time getting familiar with our products and the industrial challenges we help solve. One of the key application market categories GE Digital is focused in is Asset Performance Management, or APM. Let me take a few lines to introduce you to APM and explain how and why recent advances in Industrial IoT (IIoT) technology are fueling a surge in interest in the space. I’ll then offer a few use-case scenarios and invite a discussion on other market opportunities. For the entrepreneurs out there, pay attention – there’s a lot of whitespace.

First, what is Asset Performance Management? It’s a market category primarily focused around strategies and tools designed to more effectively maintain your assets, track their health, react to warnings/alerts, and ultimately, optimize across cost, availability, reliability, and safety. While historically this was often done manually and using paper, it’s now automated with sensors, devices, and software. So taking it a level higher, what do we mean by “asset”?

Let’s use an example that most people will be very familiar with - your car. Your car is an asset. You depend upon it heavily. You have to maintain it regularly to keep it operating well and avoid breakdowns. When you get warning lights, you service it. And eventually, you’ll decide to replace it as the break-downs and maintenance costs increase.

Stepping back, there are four important aspects there:

1)     Developing a maintenance strategy (based on a vehicle’s physical properties)

2)     Tracking the vehicles’ health

3)     Handling warnings when they surface

4)     Optimizing for cost, availability, reliability, and safety

All four of those are part of Asset Performance Management. However, let’s drill into 1 & 2 in one area – how often you service the car. Many vehicles indicate every 15,000 miles. Why is that? For the dealer, it’s conservative and you’re less likely to have issues. For the servicer, they generate more revenue. You didn’t design the car, so you’re likely to follow their guidance, despite it costing more, being inconvenient at times, and sometimes causing new issues (e.g., technician didn’t reassemble everything correctly).

Wouldn’t it be better if the vehicle was able to track its health and give you a recommendation for servicing based on your preferences? Modern vehicles now track their health, leveraging data sensors, and using that to indicate when maintenance is required. However, these systems don’t take into consideration your preferences between availability, reliability, cost, and safety.

Why does that matter? Another example… a few years back, my wife and I embarked on a 10-day road trip to visit several national parks. Our car had 3,000 miles before the next “scheduled maintenance” so we assumed that we were good. Half-way through the trip, the repair light came on in the middle of the desert. Long-story short, we had a very stressful time finding a repair shop and lost a day from our vacation to get it serviced.

How could that have been better? The vehicle already understands its health, but it didn’t understand that we would be taking this road trip, for which our preference for reliability would be higher, even if that meant higher cost. Additionally, the road trip exposed it to different environmental factors, particularly higher elevations and greater temperature ranges. With that additional information, it should have recommended servicing before we left.

That’s just one illustration of how Asset Performance Management could optimize a situation. One might argue whether this is worthwhile for a $20,000 vehicle with $400 servicing costs. However, what if we were talking about a multi-billion dollar power generation plant, where taking it partially down can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue?  Or alternatively, an offshore oil drilling platform, which has hundreds of maintenance activities, crews and parts are helicoptered in, and there are significant safety / environmental factors?

Fortunately, General Electric has solutions for that with Asset Performance Management (APM) powered by Predix, the #1 platform for industrial applications, to incorporate real-time device signals and alerts. Hundreds of industrial companies now use APM to optimize their assets performance, improve reliability/safety, and reduce cost. 

So with that, let me open it up for ideas on potential scenarios where APM could be applied, or any other thoughts you might have. My feeling is that there’s a lot of whitespace out there.