Jeff Immelt, CEO, GE, has said the next wave of industrial productivity will be driven by digital solutions, adding that industrial firms will in no distant future have little option but to rethink their strategies in this digital context.
Immelt forecasts that the market for industrial-internet solutions could grow to $100 billion by 2025, amid a growing need among industrial firms for ways to reinvigorate flagging productivity.
He discloses that the US multinational is in the process of recasting itself as a digital industrial company in anticipation of rapid growth in the so-called ‘industrial internet,’ also referred to as the ‘Internet of large things,’ covering everything from locomotives and aircraft to power plants and factories.
The GE boss says, “If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you wake up tomorrow morning as a digital industrial company and that change is upon us,” he told an audience at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Technology developments were making it possible to glean data from machines and use that information to improve efficiencies and lower costs.
“In future, in a flight from one city to another, the aircraft engine will generate a terabyte of data,” Immelt says, arguing that the information would be analysed and models developed to improve fuel performance, predict engine wear and reduce emissions.
He stresses that the industrial internet was principally about taking existing assets and making them work better, which in the African context could translate into 5 percent to 10 percent power plant efficiency, or reducing the amount of fuel used in operating a diesel locomotive.
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