GE Power Customer Story

Long term staffing is extremely vital to GE Power Services. It takes 18 months to train one technician before GE Power Services can send them to a job. “Because of that, it’s extremely important to plan 24+ months ahead of time,” explained Keisler.

GE Power Services wanted to move away from manual scheduling and dispatch in order to optimize resource utilization of its 6,000 field technicians. The business knew if it could create greater efficiencies in planning their technicians’ work, improve their effectiveness on the job, and decrease their reliance on contract staffing, they could see a huge impact.

GE Power Services leverages Predix Asset Performance Management (Predix APM) at its M&D center to monitor 2500 assets around the world in real-time. With Predix APM, the team optimizes the performance of assets by using advanced analytics to anticipate downtime before it occurs.

In addition to Predix APM, GE Power Services utilizes ServiceMax for scheduling. The ServiceMax Dispatch Console was central to the strategy to make GE Power Service technicians more efficient and successful. It starts with increasing the field engineer’s applied time­: by filtering technician skills and other factors, ServiceMax better matches engineers to the work—increasing their effectiveness on the job, and ultimately decreasing time spent on the job.

“We needed to accurately measure that productivity through utilization metrics and use it alongside our future demand forecasts to plan capacity and optimize costs,” according to Keisler. The combination of Predix, APM, ServiceMax, and their analytics provide a detailed understanding of operational data such as utilization and regional performance.

Since deployment in 2012, GE Power Services has seen an efficiency increase of 7%. Each point of increase saves the company $5 million to the bottom line, thus, the business has saved $35 million over the last 5 years.

“ServiceMax gave us visibility to not only engineers’ availability but also their skills and expertise. It also closed big gaps in the information we needed to accurately forecast and plan for demand,” said Keisler.

The deployment of Predix APM also has the potential to reduce unplanned downtime by up to 5%, decrease false alarms by up to 75%, and minimize operations and maintenance costs by up to 25%.

By using tools like ServiceMax and APM, the goal of achieving zero unplanned downtime for customers doesn't seem to far off. “If you haven’t started to take advantage of what IIoT can deliver and this cycle of improvement, I say it’s time to start making the investment in tools like this that can help you get there.”