GE Digital Releases APM 4.4 Update for Industrial Reliability and Maintenance Work Processes

Author photo: Craig Resnick
ByCraig Resnick
Category:
Company and Product News

GE Digital unveiled the latest version of its Asset Performance Management (APM) mission-critical software suite.  Available both as a cloud and on-premises solution, APM allows companies in asset and process intensive industries, such as Oil & Gas, Chemical and Power Generation, to align key technologies with critical work processes and functions across their businesses.

With this most recent release, GE Digital focused on driving tighter integration across capabilities within the APM solution as well as to existing systems, such as Enterprise Asset Management / Computerized Maintenance Management System (EAM/CMMS) solutions.  In addition, APM focuses on automating work processes with enhancements to allow users to automate tasks and provide a more seamless experience to have the right information at the right time to make critical business decisions.

The latest APM release added more than 30 new Digital Twin blueprints for Oil & Gas, Chemical, Fossil and Nuclear Power Generation, as well as Mining, to its catalog of more than 300 pre-configured analytic and diagnostic models for various equipment classes and systems across industries.  The blueprints monitor asset health by detecting degradation or performance loss across the asset or system to provide a diagnostic recommendation.  This helps to reduce the time to value, with built-in detection and remediation information guidance.

Several new reports are also available for predictive diagnostic users, including Sensor Health Reporting and the Predictive Diagnostic Coverage report.  These help users understand diagnostic coverage relative to an asset’s designed capabilities.  Sister Asset Charting for Predictive Diagnostics functionality, now available on the Predix APM cloud platform, allows customers to directly compare the performance of similar asset types across the organization. 

For SmartSignal Classic on-premises customers, APM now includes a time to action prognostic, allowing users to forecast data trend lines over time and estimate when an actual alarm threshold will be reached.  This further enables monitoring and maintenance teams to prioritize and plan corrective action when equipment degradation is detected.

For Predix APM cloud customers, Advanced Visualization capabilities are being introduced to enable dashboarding, analysis and reporting on APM alerts and cases.  Dashboards are now available through the integration of a Business Intelligence (BI) tool for additional dashboarding capabilities. 

APM Classic on-premises customers will be able to incorporate a new method for connecting APM to process historians with the release of OT Connect.  The new framework is used to set up a connection via an OPC server to ingest metadata, schedule enabled synchronization of tag metadata, and enable tag subscriptions, which trigger Health Indicators and Policy workflows.  When customers upgrade to APM 4.4, existing data in OPC families will be upgraded to reference the new structure.

Enhanced Compliance Features for Oil & Gas, Petrochemical, Power Gen and Wind industries in Europe and North America

Customers in the Oil & Gas and PetroChemical sectors can leverage new features specific to their industries: European Regulatory Inspection Content, Compliance Management, and Safety Instrumentation System (SIS) parity.  New compliance management functionality, released for Mechanical Integrity programs in late 2019, leverages APM’s integration capabilities to EAM systems using data to help automatically generate an inspection plan based on the regulatory code that applies to the equipment. This functionality leverages out-of-the-box regulatory codes included with APM Integrity. 

In addition, this new release includes European regulatory inspection codes, specifically built around the German industrial safety regulations BetrSichV.  This allows APM to automatically recommend applicable inspection task types along with recommended intervals based on each asset type.  It also helps identify the certification requirements of Inspectors based on the criticality of the asset.  The certification requirement is a government regulation based on pressure, volume and fluid characteristics.

For North American Power Generation companies, the release supports compliance and reporting to meet federal requirements.  The Generation Availability Analysis (GAA) Wind module in APM allows companies with mixed fleets that include one or more wind farms to report their wind performance and sub-group data to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) using the Generating Availability Data System (GADS) Wind Reporting application. 

GE Digital has also announced enhancements and unlimited availability of Predix APM for European customers via its Frankfurt, Germany operations center.  In partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), GE has made technology investments to help enhance customer experience and further support GDPR regulations.

 

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