Transition Towards Proactive Service

Two years ago, ServiceMax and PTC jointly announced a new solution that enabled Field Service Management to leverage early failure warnings from IIoT enabled machines. Productized as Connected Field Service, this solution was met with high level of interest by both our customers and the market. Several customers have successfully deployed this solution, which clearly indicates that equipment manufacturers and operators understand the value of transforming service delivery from a reactive to a proactive model.

 

Bleeding the Innovation Edge

Today, we announced an innovation that took this to another level. The integration between GE’s Asset Performance Management (APM) application and ServiceMax Field Service Management solution adds a new level of intelligence to Connected Field Service.  This integration not only enhances our customer’s ability to anticipate issues before they occur, it also gives them tools to evaluate when time-based approaches can be extended or eliminated, further reducing service costs.  By leveraging APM’s intelligent asset strategies, customers can balance three traditionally competing priorities—reducing cost, improving availability and reliability, and managing risk—to help optimize their overall asset and operational performance.

 

Connected Field Service – Moving to Proactive Model

To begin with, Connected Field Service relies on alerts received from sensors installed on a given machine. These alerts signal a detection of a failure or an anomaly in the asset operation, i.e. a sensor reading out of tolerance band. This approach is a significant step from reactive to preventive service as it enables to deliver service based on detected issues before they result in any unplanned downtime.

 

The APM Difference

GE’s APM takes this concept to the next level.  It leverages very sophisticated digital twin models well in advance of traditional preventive alerts to predict potential failures weeks or even months in advance. These predictive techniques are a key element of many risk-based service strategies for assets.

From here, customers can leverage APM to develop Intelligent Asset Strategies, often extending or eliminating time-based preventive maintenance and dropping the savings directly to the bottom line. Finally, the APM integration enables ServiceMax to feed data such as service history back into APM to further enrich over time the asset strategies managed by APM.

 

Accelerating the Digital Transformation Journey

Today’s announcement empowers customers to differentiate themselves in service delivery by not only generating significant savings and productivity gains but helping them move towards an outcome-based business model. The new integration of APM and ServiceMax is an important step towards the automation of service delivery – from automatic service request to scheduling, dispatch, and all the way to service debrief. In the era of the Industrial Internet, such intelligent automation is indispensable for accelerating their digital transformation of service delivery.

ABOUT Lubor Ptacek

Avatar photoLubor Ptacek is a former SVP of product & solution marketing at ServiceMax, the leader in Service Execution Management.