By Serge-Paul Carrasco on September 18, 2016

The New GE Digital

(B) You have probably seen on TV the new commercial from GE – “Sarah: GE is the perfect mix of digital and industrial – an ideal combination like peanut butter & jelly”. If you did not know it yet, GE imagination @ work is transforming GE into a digital company for the Internet of Things (IoT): GE Digital. One of the key products of GE Digital is Predix:

“Predix powers the modern digital industrial businesses that drive the global economy. Predix-based applications are connecting industrial assets, collecting, and analyzing data and delivering real-time insights for optimizing industrial infrastructure and operations, including GE and non-GE assets.”

GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt gave last year two interviews to McKinsey on digitizing the industrial space: “GE’s Jeff Immelt on digitizing in the industrial space” and “GE’s Jeff Immelt on evolving a corporate giant”.

In many cases, the Industrial Internet adapts the technologies that it inherits from the Consumer Internet. New technologies emerge from the Consumer Internet and are being transformed for Industrial Internet applications.

McKinsey recently published a new report on the digitalization of the enterprise value chain:

“From supply chains to production to customer experience, digitization is transforming the way industry functions—and unleashing global opportunities for value creation.

In the past few years, we have seen digitization bring its first benefits to the industrial sector, particularly in processing and manufacturing, yet enormous untapped potential remains. Digital capabilities such as e-commerce platforms can significantly improve traditional customer-supplier experiences. Additional advances in automation, big data and analytics, and the Internet of Things create additional opportunities for substantial gains along the entire industry value chain.”

McKinsey has even developed a map to better understand the digitalization opportunities in the manufacturing sector: