Transforming the way we work to win

Change comes quickly in the digital industrial space, and my Evaluation & Optimization team at GE Oil & Gas have been part of a particularly tumultuous and ultimately transformative year. A business that was facing challenges following a market downturn turned to Fastworks tools and principles to get faster and more customer-centric - and netted a profit in Q1 of this year, a remarkable turnaround. The business now is positioned neatly between the physical and digital worlds, providing customers with actionable data to help them produce oil and gas faster, cheaper, and more safely. 

Fastworks is helping us drive growth, transform our customers experience, and positively impact culture and morale. It hasn't been easy, but it's involved thinking outside the box in many, many ways. One of the very particular things about my team: there is a lot of speed, innovation and original thinking. Sometimes people look at us and think we're crazy. 

Faced with 80 percent market share in some areas, there weren't always clear paths to growth. So we took the questions to the customers: what else can we do? Which of your problems remain unsolved, and how can GE help? 

It has been a journey of innovating, innovating, trying, testing, partnering with customers. Now we're starting to get a lot of traction. 

These customer conversations had a wide range of impact, from product development to prompting an overhaul of customer interface and internal processes that stood to benefit from Fastworks' emphasis on customer-centric speed and adaptability. On the product side, these conversations have led to increased collaboration and partnerships with empowered customers. 

“Collaboration is crucial to accelerate technology advancement, streamline specifications and enhance solutions that meet the challenges of the current environment and position our customers to thrive in the future,” said GE O&G's CEO Lorenzo Simonelli. Fastworks practices and customer collaboration are making a measurable, money-saving impact, as one example, the development time of our Industry-First Motor Diagnostics ESP sensor was trimmed more than 50% addressing customer pain points around artificial lift reliability and efficiency which lead to reduction in customer`s operating costs as well. 

Our customers prefer GE's best-in-class sensing technologies in Zenith and Sondex based on the quality and the reliability of information available - but if the data doesn't lead to concrete action, data in itself can become a burden. My team is working to make sure that customers don't get overwhelmed with all the data we produce; linking the sensing and automation technologies with our Predix based digital solution Intellistream. This translates the data into insights and actionable recommendations so that our customers can seamlessly connect the dots and get quicker outcomes that are valuable and relevant. As an example, one of our customers in Latin America is now benefiting from a 10% reduction in lifting cost, and another customer is the Middle East is increasing their average oil production by 5%. 

Just as important, though, is a more intangible shift to culture and morale. For a fast-thinking team that likes to experiment with creative solutions, the Fastworks philosophy has been a perfect fit. In the beginning, we were being very harsh on ourselves, calling things failures that were not failures; there were a lot of lessons that were not being captured. When you're in a beat-up mode, the team is down. Then you start winning and that confidence gets restored. 

I credit the success of our endeavor to Greg Davie, Steve Beattie, Julian Cudmore, Sue Marland, Karen Grant, Uche Okudo, Gerardo Perez, Wessam Nassar, Felipe Pinto, Sandy Skinner, Brian Johnston, Leste Aihevba, Loveena Kapur, Srinivas Badami, Scott Raphael, Levi Quinn, Amer Khayyat, Guy Mason & their entire teams. It is our wonderful people that really make magic happen!

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