GE Digital’s APM 4.4 Update Rapidly Reduces Cost and Risk from Industrial Reliability and Maintenance Work Processes

• GE Digital’s APM 4.4 uses Digital Twins, Advanced Visualizations and improved Connectivity to help Asset and Process Intensive Companies in Power Generation, Oil & Gas and Chemical Processing Industries to Rapidly Reduce Costs while Adapting to Changing Market Conditions
• Power Generation companies using existing APM solutions enjoy availability / uptime increases of up to 20%; with O&M Cost Reduction up to millions of dollars per year
• Oil & Gas and Chemical Processing companies using APM enjoy up to 6% improvements in availability, up to 40% reductions in reactive maintenance and up to 20% reduction in costs associated with Health, Safety and Environment issues

 GE Digital today unveiled the latest version of its industry-leading Asset Performance Management (APM) mission-critical software suite. Available both as a cloud and on-premises solution, APM allows companies in asset and process intensive industries like Oil & Gas, Chemical and Power Generation to align key technologies with critical work processes and functions across their businesses.

With this most recent release, GE Digital has focused on driving tighter integration across capabilities within the APM solution as well as to existing systems such as Enterprise Asset Management / Computerized Maintenance Management System (EAM/CMMS) solutions. In addition, APM focuses on automating work processes with enhancements to allow users to automate tasks and provide a more seamless experience to have the right information at the right time to make critical business decisions.

“Many vendors claim they have APM but actually have only asset analytics with no direct diagnostics capabilities,” said Kevin Prouty, IDC Group Vice President, Energy and Manufacturing Insights. “Integration with critical plant management solutions, like EAM, enables true APM companies to bring together data from all equipment and OEMs across the plant and the fleet to eliminate data silos and facilitate reliability improvements, optimize O&M spend and quantify risk reduction.”

“Our software helps customers to better operate, analyze and optimize their business processes with simplicity, speed and scale,” said Linda Rae, General Manager, GE Digital Power Generation and Oil & Gas. “APM helps industrial companies to efficiently and rapidly reduce costs while adapting to changing market conditions. With more than 30 years’ experience delivering software for our partners in industry, we’re always learning how to help them rise to today’s challenges.”

Shorter Time to Value with Largest Catalog of Digital Twin Blueprints

The latest APM release added more than 30 new Digital Twin blueprints for Oil & Gas, Chemical, Fossil and Nuclear Power Generation as well as Mining, to its catalog of more than 300 pre-configured analytic and diagnostic models for various equipment classes and systems across industries. Built by reliability subject matter experts, the blueprints monitor asset health by detecting degradation or performance loss across the asset or system to provide a diagnostic recommendation. This significantly reduces the time to value for our customers, with built-in detection and remediation information guidance.

Several new reports are also available for predictive diagnostic users including Sensor Health Reporting and the Predictive Diagnostic Coverage report. These help users understand diagnostic coverage relative to an asset’s designed capabilities. Sister Asset Charting for Predictive Diagnostics functionality, now available on the Predix APM cloud platform, allows customers to directly compare the performance of similar asset types across the organization.

For SmartSignal Classic on-premises customers APM now includes a time to action prognostic, allowing users to forecast data trend lines over time and estimate when an actual alarm threshold will be reached. This further enables monitoring and maintenance teams to prioritize and plan corrective action when equipment degradation is detected.

Simpler Visualizations Help Teams Connect & Analyze

For Predix APM cloud customers, Advanced Visualization capabilities are being introduced to enable rich dashboarding, analysis and reporting on APM alerts, cases and more. Dashboards are now available through the integration of a Business Intelligence (BI) tool for additional dashboarding capabilities. This new feature is already in use by customers like Tri-State Generation & Transmission Association to utilize customized dashboards for their fleet of assets similar to what EPRI guidelines are for fleet management of Monitoring & Diagnostics (M&D) Centers.

APM Classic on-premises customers will be able to incorporate a new method for connecting APM to process historians with the release of OT Connect. The new framework is used to set up a connection via an OPC server to ingest metadata, schedule enabled synchronization of tag metadata, and enable tag subscriptions which trigger Health Indicators and Policy workflows. When customers upgrade to APM 4.4, existing data in OPC families will be upgraded to reference the new structure.

Enhanced Compliance Features for Oil & Gas, Petrochemical, Power Gen and Wind industries in Europe and North America

Customers in the Oil & Gas and PetroChemical sectors can take advantage of new features specific to their industries: European Regulatory Inspection Content, Compliance Management, and Safety Instrumentation System (SIS) parity. New compliance management functionality, released for Mechanical Integrity programs in late 2019, leverages APM’s strong integration capabilities to EAM systems using data to automatically generate an inspection plan based on the regulatory code that applies to the equipment. This functionality leverages out-of-the-box regulatory codes included with APM Integrity.

In addition, this new release includes European regulatory inspection codes, specifically built around the German industrial safety regulations BetrSichV. This allows APM to automatically recommend applicable inspection task types along with recommended intervals based on each asset type. It also helps identify the certification requirements of Inspectors based on the criticality of the asset. The certification requirement is a government regulation based on pressure, volume and fluid characteristics.

For North American Power Generation companies, the release supports compliance and reporting to meet federal requirements. The Generation Availability Analysis (GAA) Wind module in APM allows companies with mixed fleets that include one or more wind farms to report their wind performance and sub-group data to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) using the Generating Availability Data System (GADS) Wind Reporting application.

GE Digital has also announced enhancements and unlimited availability of Predix APM for European customers via its Frankfurt, Germany operations center. In partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), GE has made technology investments to enhance customer experience and further support GDPR regulations.

The GE Digital APM Roadmap continues to advance the state of technologies for APM as well as features and functions.  APM 4.4is now generally available from GE Digital. More information can be found here.