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By 2020, there will be more than seven connected devices for every person alive. Service providers must anticipate this new reality, the speed at which it’s emerging, and its impact on business models explains Joe Kenny, Vice President Global Customer Transformation & Success for ServiceMax, a GE Digital company.

The global economy is in the middle of the most disruptive period in all of human history. Companies that have been fuel for the global economic engine that powered the late 20th century are quickly disappearing from the global stage.

According to the Olin School of Business, 40% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will be gone in the next 10 years. Much of this business transformation is due to the accelerated advancement of technology. We are, in effect, making better and cheaper things that enable us to make better and cheaper things. Organisations that do not recognise this reality, and adapt to it, are going to face incredible challenges, much faster than ever before.

While many people are amazed at the success of Uber, few consider the consequences to Uber’s competitors.

While many people are amazed at the success of Uber, few consider the consequences to Uber’s competitorsIn New York City, a taxi medallion cost $1.3m in 2014 and two years later they were selling for $250k (Business Insider – 12 October 2016). That same article noted that the total share of all taxi rides for medallion owners in New York fell from 84% in April 2014, to 65% in 2015; A 20% market share decline in 12 months. Those that invested, over generations and decades, in N.Y.C. taxi medallions, will eventually see those medallions lose all of their value.

Ray Kurzwiel, futurist and author of the book, “The Singularity is Coming”, states that based on our current rate of change that, “from a historic perspective, the 21st Century will experience 20,000 years of technology advancement in 100 years”. What is driving this “Age of Acceleration”? The information and communications revolutions of the late 20th century. So, what does all of this have to do with how we service our corporate equipment and assets? Better, cheaper, and faster technology allows for a fundamental paradigm shift in how service providers approach customers and their markets.

Leveraging the technical revolution allows for machine to machine communication, remote asset monitoring, preventive maintenance planning, and predictive analytics. This is not something that is coming, it is something that is already here.Leveraging the technical revolution allows for machine to machine communication, remote asset monitoring, preventive maintenance planning, and predictive analytics. This is not something that is coming, it is something that is already here.

Major markets that have embraced these technology advancements include aviation, transportation, and power generation. Aviation Week reports that an average twin-engine plane can produce over 850 terabytes of data over 12 hours of flight. That data informs on everything from temperature, vibration, oil pressure, basically every aspect of that asset’s performance. It informs service providers of the exact status of that asset over time, when it will need maintenance, and exactly what maintenance it will need.

That level of information will shortly be available on almost every asset in service. Currently, there are approximately 28 billion connected devices on the planet. In the next three years, that number is expected to almost double to more than 50 billion.

That is more than seven connected devices for every person alive in 2020. Service providers need to anticipate this new reality, and more importantly, the speed at which this new reality is emerging. Positioning a service organisation to leverage these capabilities, access these technologies, and drive efficiency, effectiveness, and technologically advanced service will be critical to their survival in the market. It’s one of the main factors driving the exponential rise of field service.

Utilising technology to drive predictive maintenance, guaranteed uptime, defined service windows, and the move to defined service outcomes will be the price of admission to providing service and maintenance.Utilising technology to drive predictive maintenance, guaranteed uptime, defined service windows, and the move to defined service outcomes will be the price of admission to providing service and maintenance.

By way of example, GE already has 800,000 Digital Twins in operation that provide a digital mirror on the status and performance of equipment - covering assets from jet engines to wind turbines - allowing engineers to predict when they need servicing - helping field service engineers make sure that they perform the right service, right first time. Soon there will be more than a million Digital Twins in operation. If you are not positioning and preparing for this reality now, you may already be too late.

While there is always talk of the high cost of doing nothing, in the past there was a period of time for reflection, evaluation, and a window of opportunity to changes one’s mind. That will not be the case in the future. A missed opportunity will be gone before you know it.

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Digital Twins have a big role to play in field service management and will be essential for creating business intelligence writes Mark Homer at ServiceMax, a GE Digital Company

We often hear the phrase, ‘you cannot account for human error’ but that seems illogical in today’s connected world. We have the technology to not just account for human error but to eradicate it.

The Internet of Things with the proliferation of affordable and reliable sensors is changing the way in which we can view, manage, service and support technology, processes and any physical object. By mirroring a process, product or service into a virtual world, we can create environments in which machines can automatically analyse performance, warn of impending issues, identify existing or potential errors and even suggest part upgrades or changes to procedures to make them more efficient.

This is the digital twin idea. As a concept, it’s been around for a while (NASA used it on early space missions) but the emergence of IoT has made it a commercial reality. Digital twin eliminates guesswork from determining the best course of action to service critical physical assets, from engines to power turbines.

 

Easy access to this combination of deep knowledge and intelligence about your assets paves the road to wider optimisation and business transformation.

Digital twin technology spans across all industries where the value is in assets and more generally complex systems. Its ability to deliver early warnings, predictions, and optimisation is fairly universal. In time, I think we’ll see the concept of a digital twin to be applied to human beings as well, playing a significant role in healthcare.

However just mirroring is not enough. If the aim is to achieve zero downtime or at the very least, overall insight into on-going product and process performance, the digital twin has to be analysed and that analysis has to feed other functions.

What the digital twin produces, when bundling data with intelligence, is a view of each asset’s history and its potential future performance.

This continuum of information leads to early warnings, predictions, ideas for optimisation, and most importantly a plan of action to keep assets in service longer will, sending commands to machines in response to those forecasts.

In other words, if you close the loop, with data and predictions, you can act directly on the asset itself. That’s where Asset Performance Management and Field Service Management are changing the way service operations run.

 

By combining APM with FSM tools, the digital twin idea is transformed into an intelligent agent. Businesses have, for the first time, a complete suite of intelligence at their fingertips, to understand potential equipment issues, and pre-empt them or act upon them quickly and efficiently with the correct tools and parts, should machinery need fixing.

This means field service is managed more efficiently, reducing costs and ensuring minimum downtime as engineers attend jobs with a full understanding of the problem, the right parts to hand and a complete knowledge of how to fix it.

This is the shift from an often blind and reactive approach to fixing broken products and services to a predictive model that should eliminate waste, reduce costs, downtime and importantly human error.

The digital twin idea has additional benefits too, as it can use historical data and current data to provide a complete picture of a particular asset, its past performance, what it should be achieving now and its likely end of life date, when it would be predicted to be less efficient.

 

This sort of knowledge is gold dust for product designers and manufacturers as it can feed back accurately, which parts work well and where machines would need improving or upgrading.

Combined with the knowledge of field service professionals this makes for a powerful tool for upselling products and services to customers. Any new ideas or enhancements can be fully supported with data analysis and perhaps even simulations to illustrate how new parts and functions would improve performance.

It offers justification and also accountability and should cut through irrelevant or unsuitable product or service ideas.

It’s transforming service at the edge by bringing together all the facets that make businesses and machines tick - and goes a long way to creating a world of zero unplanned downtime.

 

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