The more General Electric gets into its plan for an “Industrial Internet,” the bigger it seems.
On Wednesday, the company announced 14 more products that combine industrial equipment, Internet-linked sensors and software to monitor performance and analyze big streams of data. G.E. had previously announced 10 similar industrial products.
The executive in charge of the project for G.E. also said that by next year almost all equipment made by the company will have sensors and Big Data software.
“Everyone wants prediction about performance, and better asset management,” said William Ruh, vice president of global software at G.E. “The ideas of speed, of information velocity, is what will differentiate the winners from the losers.”
The so-called Industrial Internet involves putting different kinds of sensors, sometimes by the thousands, in machines and the places they work, then remotely monitoring performance to maximize profitability. G.E., one of the world’s biggest makers of equipment for power generation, aviation, health care, and oil and gas extraction, has been one of its biggest promoters.
G.E. also announced partnerships with Cisco, AT&T and Intel as part of Wednesday’s announcement. The company already has engagements with Accenture, and Amazon.com’s big cloud-computing service. It is also an investor in Pivotal, a company building Industrial Internet applications. In July, I.B.M. announced it would collaborate with Pivotal.
The products that G.E. announced Wednesday, which work with a data management system it calls Predix, are in aviation, power and water, transportation, oil and gas, health care, and energy management. Mr. Ruh said that one product, designed to maximize a jet’s fuel burn while monitoring carbon emissions, would save an airline $90 million over five years. A power generation product designed to optimize turbine usage was expected to increase one utility’s profits by $28 million, while creating lower emissions per megawatt.
The push into the Industrial Internet is likely to have profound changes for G.E. as well. Mr. Ruh, who heads a 300-person Bay Area office, said G.E. is adopting practices like releasing stripped-down products quickly, monitoring usage and rapidly changing designs depending on how things are used by customers. These approaches follow the “lean start-up” style at many software-intensive Internet companies.
“We’re getting these offerings done in three, six, nine months,” he said. “It used to take three years.”
Mark Little, G.E.’s chief technology officer, has also said that the Industrial Internet could revive G.E.’s manufacturing business in the United States, though not in ways traditional manufacturers would recognize. Since G.E. wants to understand how machines behave in the field, it also needs to have its sensors on them from the earliest part of their creation.
“We’ve spent most of my career trying to offload manufacturing,” Mr. Little said in an interview in June. “Now we’re talking about vertical integration again.” Much of the manufacturing, however, will be done by robots, he said.
G.E. may be anticipating some criticism if it does move factories from China to the United States but doesn’t put many humans in them. On Tuesday, the company published a paper saying that massive automation of factories would not mean a net job loss. Instead, it said, workers would be retrained to be more productive by interacting with the machines. It was not clear how or why this retraining, or the expansion of United States manufacturing using robots, would require nearly the same number of workers.
“No one is talking about a refreshing of the tradition of manufacturing onshore,” Mr. Ruh said. “The scope and kinds of jobs will change, and they will require lots more math and science skills.”