The Dawn of the Smart Factory

The Industrial Internet

With its recent blockbuster report, “Industrial Internet: Pushing the Boundaries of Minds and Machines,” General Electric (IW 500/5) has found itself at the center of the smart factory discussion.

The interconnected network of industrial operations that makes up the industrial Internet, the report explains, “brings together the advances of two transformative revolutions: the myriad machines, facilities, fleets and networks that arose from the Industrial Revolution, and the more recent powerful advances in computing, information and communication systems brought to the fore by the Internet Revolution.”

The result is the third wave of the Industrial Revolution that opens up “new frontiers to accelerate productivity, reduce inefficiency and waste and enhance the human work experience” that could possibly be worth a staggering $10 to $15 trillion to the global economy.

“Securing even part of these productivity gains could bring great benefits at both the individual and economy-wide level,” says GE chief economist and co-author of the report, Marco Annunziata.

“The full potential of the industrial Internet will be felt when the three primary digital elements -- intelligent devices, intelligent systems and intelligent automation -- fully merge with the physical machines, facilities, fleets and networks,” the report adds. “When this occurs, the benefits of enhanced productivity, lower costs and reduced waste will propagate through the entire industrial economy.”

In San Francisco last November at an elaborate event kicking off the report, GE CEO Jeff Immelt introduced the industrial world to its new role in the future of manufacturing brought forth by the industrial Internet.

“The productivity era is alive and well,” he told the crowd. “Industrial companies, not just GE, but all industrial companies are no longer just about the big iron,” he said, gesturing to the massive jet engine balanced above him on the stage. “All of us are going to seek to interface with the analytics, the data, the software that surround our products.”

 “This is today,” he added. “This is not about any future. The industry is moving forward.”

 To Don Busiek, general manager of manufacturing software at GE Intelligent Platforms, Immelt’s presentation and the report itself are heralding a new age of manufacturing.

“There is a huge shift happening in manufacturing today,” he says. “With the advent of new technologies, smarter assets and smarter devices, today’s advanced factories have essentially become data centers driving intelligence across the enterprise.”

“Historically if you look at manufacturing software, it has been siloed systems; it has been systems that didn’t talk to each other,” explains Busiek. “They didn’t talk, they didn’t relate, so as a plant manager you couldn’t compare your performance against another plant.”

With the advent of the industrial Internet, he continues, suddenly plants have the ability to tie all of their data across multiple plants, even view it over the web on their handheld devices and finally be able to understand and compare their performance across the enterprise and  the performance of equipment across different lines.

Doing so, “all of a sudden you can structure your schedule across your plant with more intelligence,” he explains. “You can schedule your shift, your personnel with more intelligence. You can even program the heating in your building with more intelligence.”

“To me, that’s where it’s going,” he says. “Toward that concept of a connected world, where all of your devices are rolling up data, but you’re slicing it. It’s not the thousands of pieces of data; you’re slicing it in such a way that it is presented to the right user at the right time based on their role.”

“To me,” he says, “that’s the smart factory of the future.”