FAIRFIELD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GE (NYSE:GE) today released a new report detailing how the Industrial Internet, predictive analytics and new machine-human collaboration in the workplace can significantly boost productivity, create new jobs and skills, and minimize unplanned downtime in major industries. The report, titled The Industrial Internet@Work and written by GE Chief Economist, Marco Annunziata, and GE’s Director of Global Strategy and Analytics, Peter C. Evans, finds that the time and costs wasted are largely due to inefficiencies in how information is gathered, stored, accessed and shared. As information becomes more intelligent, the future of work will be transformed and a new, more highly skilled workforce will emerge. Workers will be able to spend more of their time in higher value-added activities, while upgrading their knowledge, skills and experience at a much faster pace. New digital and software tools will create a more efficient and productive way to interact with machines, increasing collaboration and faster information sharing.
“Gas turbine maintenance workers, for instance, do much of their service work on a set timetable and lack full real-time information about the condition of the turbine parts,” Annunziata said. “If they come too late and failure occurs, unplanned downtime can cascade across the system and affect the economy. A new, highly skilled workforce will emerge as the Industrial Internet unleashes a new standard in efficiency that saves entire industries billions of dollars in unplanned downtime and turns industrial operators into skilled information-workers.”
The report highlights the billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of man hours the Industrial Internet can save. This is just a slice of the total installed base of industrial equipment that requires the attention of operators, field engineers, fleet managers and executives who either have direct or indirect interaction with complex machines.
POWER:
- Time to Service: 52 million man-hours per year
- Estimated Value: $7 billion
AVIATION:
- Time to Service: 205 million man-hours per year
- Estimated Value: $10 billion
RAIL:
- Time to Service: 52 million man-hours per year
- Estimated Value: $3 billion
HEALTHCARE:
- Time to Service: 4 million man-hours per year
- Estimated Value: $250 million
According to the report, the Industrial Internet will create new jobs, both from the overall boost it brings to economic growth as well as the need to manage the new technologies it introduces. These future jobs like digital-mechanical engineers, data scientists, user interface experts, and business operations data analysts, will require new technical skills, and will enable greater workplace efficiency and productivity. This will result in increased job satisfaction among workers; Current workers will become fluent in emerging technologies, improving their efficiency, while new workers will be trained to contribute specialized scientific and technical skills.
The report shows that a majority of work is still being done in a scheduled and uninformed way, or happening reactively as technicians and engineers rush to repair preventable failures. Digital and software tools will introduce new workplace efficiencies and change the work experience for hundreds of thousands of workers, from field engineers and drilling rig workers to pilots, doctors and nurses. Specifically, this means:
- Faster access to relevant information, through new insights from analytics and better communication to mobile collaboration
- Increased machine-human collaboration; connected and communicative machines will self-monitor, self-heal, and proactively send information to other machines and workers
A wind farm engineer, for example, could soon arrive at work with a wireless device indicating which turbine needs attention and what needs to be fixed. The same device will store and transmit relevant technical information and enable the engineer to share information and learnings with remote colleagues
For more information please view the full report.
About the authors:
Marco Annunziata, Chief Economist, GE
Marco Annunziata is the chief economist and executive director of global market insight at General Electric Co., responsible for global economic, financial and market analysis to support GE's business strategy. The author of "The Economics of the Financial Crisis," Annunziata is a two-time winner of the Rybczynski Prize for best paper in business economics, awarded by the Society of Business Economists in London. Before joining GE in 2011, he was chief economist at UniCredit and chief economist for Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Deutsche Bank in London. Prior to Deutsche Bank, he spent six years at the International Monetary Fund, splitting his time between emerging markets and the euro zone. At the IMF, Annunziata was involved in regular consultations with the Italian government, the Bank of Italy, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, and took part in loan negotiations in several European and Latin American emerging economies. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a B.A. from the University of Bologna.
Peter C. Evans, Director of Global Strategy and Analytics, GE
Peter Evans is Director of Global Strategy and Analytics at General Electric Co. and served for five years as the head of Global Strategy and Planning at GE Energy. Prior to joining GE, he was Director, Global Oil, and Research Director of the Global Energy Forum at Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). He also worked as an independent consultant for a variety of corporate and government clients, including the US Department of Energy, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank. Dr. Evans has extensive international energy experience, including two years as a Visiting Scholar at the Central Research Institute for the Electric Power Industry in Tokyo, Japan. He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Board Member of the National Association for Business Economics. Dr. Evans holds a BA degree from Hampshire College and a Master’s degree and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
About GE
GE (NYSE:GE) works on things that matter. The best people and the best technologies taking on the toughest challenges. Finding solutions in energy, health and home, transportation and finance. Building, powering, moving and helping to cure the world. Not just imagining. Doing. GE works. For more information, visit the company's website at www.ge.com.
