GE adds new layers to its digital industrial goals with revolutionary 3D manufacturing push
- Summary:
- GE's bought up a couple of additive manufacturing firms as part of its evolution into "the premier digital industrial company", an investment that could save it $5 billion internally, let alone tap into a lucrative revenue stream.
General Electric’s goal of becoming “the premier digital industrial company” is well-known and this ambition has been tracked closely, not least at diginomica.
Of note recently were a couple of acquisitions in the additive manufacturing equipment and services space - SLM based in Germany and Arcam out of Sweden. These are significant deals in terms of the ongoing digital transformation of the GE’s business model as being the foundation for a major push in to the additive manufacturing market.
What is additive manufacturing? Well, think 3D printing, then ramp it up to a seriously industrial scale. Additive manufacturing is a process by which digital 3D design data is used to build up a component in layers by depositing material.
It’s also a growth opportunity that GE CEO Jeff Immelt sees as highly lucrative. He expects to see about $300 million of revenue in 2017 from additive manufacturing, rising to $1 billion by 2020, while also helping take out $3 billion to $5 billion of cost out inside GE through ‘eating its own dog food’ internally at the organization. Immelt says:
We view additive manufacturing as transformative technology to expand product design, flexibility and promote speed. It facilitates the manufacturing of highly valued parts. It can dramatically improve service delivery and asset management. Importantly, these tools are perfect match for GE capability and it gives us a lead in one of the fastest growing industrial markets of this era.
We plan to launch an additive manufacturing business. We’ll offer our full line of products; we will fully leverage our existing ecosystem inside GE including product design and internal consumption. We’ll grow a strong service business including materials, design, software and production. Many of these capabilities already exist inside GE and all of our products will embed the capability of Predix and will be an important part of our Brilliant Factory initiative.
Taking flight
This is a big digital industrial play for the entire company, affirms David Joyce, President and CEO at GE Aviation, arguing that additive manufacturing is a revolutionary step forward:
Today’s manufacturing processes are castings, forgings, weldings, brazing and subtractive machines. Additive creates products by building up features in complicated geometries from powder layer-by-layer. Additive changes the game, because it changes the paradigm between the cost of manufacturing and the complexity of design. Design is going to optimize for performance and productivity with new and better cost entitlements and faster cycles.
GE Aviation is one of the first divisions to be making use of additive manufacturing techniques and technologies and this delivering benefits, says Joyce:
We are using additive in a LEAP (Leading Edge Aviation Propulsion) engine today and our assessment over the life of the LEAP production is that additive can yield a 25% to 30% additional reduction in product cost entitlement and a 25% reduction in life cycle costs and service.
In our Advanced Turboprop Engine, we’ve eliminated 845 parts in design incorporating additive. This represents an elimination of thousands of machining features and inspections and hundreds of quality plants and procurement contracts.
This productivity can be transformational. This next stage uses a turbine frame assembly in one of our jet engine development programs as an example of the enterprise productivity. Incorporating additive manufacturing, the frame assembly can be created in one design file produced by eight engineers, manufactured and inspected using one additive machine and will be repaired at one source with access to all designs and manufacturing information linked through Predix.
Compare that to today’s conventional assembly managed through 40 despairing data systems, 300 individual parts designed by 60 engineers and manufactured at over 50 sources and in service span out to five sources for repair. We believe this turbine frame assembly story is a good proxy for the future of digital industrial manufacturing.
For his part, Greg Morris, Additive Technology Leader at GE Aviation, sees four primary industry drivers that create the value chain for additive manufacturing - machines, materials, production, and services, with the maturation and advancement of equipment capabilities at the forefront:
Current laser and electron beam technology is very capable, but in order to achieve mass adoption, we will need to take machine productivity and speed to a new level. For each step change in machine speed and size, the number of parts that become candidates for additive multiplies exponentially. We also believe there are number of opportunities to incorporate advanced sensing and monitoring capabilities into future machines that will result in unparalleled part consistency and quality.
A substantial opportunity exists around the services component of additive where we can leverage our application engineering knowledge and wrap this into our Predix digital platform. This will create value for our customers in a multitude of ways including the creation of a seamless digital thread and an opportunity for customers to shorten their production learning curves by acquiring the experience GE has gained from a ramping up of additive production internally. The industries where additive has the opportunity to bring substantial value are primarily segments we know well, thus allowing us to leverage our experience for maximum benefit of customers.
This is the latest stage in revolutionizing manufacturing in the digital age, suggests Vic Abate, Head of Global Research at GE, who estimates that over the past seven years along, the firm has invested $1.5 billion in advanced manufacturing tech across all its divisions.
We have a very strong pipeline of additive technology investments that will change the game in areas like productivity, materials and digital. We can see a future with much faster, not 10% but 10x or 100x faster machines and 100x more materials for our designers to design win and with digital and entire new digital thread as enabled as this technology it’s all driven by software, not physical drawings.
These efforts will allow us to get more materials into the additive ecosystem, build bigger parts faster for the most economical solutions and optimize for properties and performance with the speed and accuracy currently not available in the industry. More industrialized machine platforms coupled with brilliant factory technologies will enable the adoption of these developments more rapidly and better differentiate GE and our customers. We see this opportunity transforming not only our new make parts, but driving new and innovative service offerings as well.
Beyond aviation
There are some ambitious targets for GE now. Looking out to 2025, Abate talks in terms of a need for a new additive machine to be brought on line within GE every three days over the next decade. Uptake will be led by the aviation business, but decision makers in oil and gas are paying close attention and learning lessons from the prime mover status of their aerospace counterparts.
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Laguna conference this week, Lorenzo Simonelli, President, GE Oil & Gas, called additive manufacturing a game changer for his industry and cited GE’s status as “early entrants”. He said:
The huge advantage for us is, you think about a future where our service shops or our customers that have large installed bases, now have a printer outside. You take out all that lead time, you take out all that working capital that was previously deployed and this is a game changer. We are already utilizing it within our factories [and there’s] much more we can do. We view this across the company as an opportunity and for GE Oil and Gas, I view it as a way that we can be differentiated again and be more meaningful for our customers and be more efficient.
Beyond that, there’s a world of potential, concludes Abate :
Business models will evolve with the distributed manufacturing that additive enables. The ability to repair components with new materials and features will drive value for our customers through our installed base. Our healthcare business is trailblazing new applications for very hard to manufacture materials such as tungsten and they’re developing direct right additive methods as a platform for electronics printing. The GE portfolio of designs, features, materials and additive processes is industry-leading and pacing technology developments across the entire ecosystem.
My take
You can’t fault GE’s determination to place a big bet on some revolutionary digital thinking. Additive manufacturing clearly has the potential to be the game changer that Immelt and his colleagues believe it to be.