Industrial Internet: Manufacturing Giant's "Apple" Dream

On July 7, General Electric (GE) of the United States reached a cooperation with China Telecom Group to connect its industrial Internet Predix platform (equivalent to the operating system of the industrial equipment version) with China Telecom's comprehensive information service. From then on, the American industrial Internet will enter China's cloud storage, telemedicine applications, intelligent manufacturing, cloud computing and other fields.

A few days later, the Industrial Internet China Association was established in New York. This is a major breakthrough in international cooperation between the Chinese and American industries and the information and communication industries following the establishment of the China-Germany Industrial 4.0 Dialogue.

It is reported that GE has carried out 12 industrial Internet pilot projects in China and is promoting more than 40 big data analysis applications. The industrial Internet, known as the symbol of the third industrial wave, began to participate in and influence the process of the "Internet" action plan in China's industrial field.

Before the large-scale introduction of industrial Internet in China's industry, it is necessary to deeply examine how the industrial Internet came from, what it is to do, for what, and whether there are side effects?

Industrial Internet

Re-inventing "Made in America"

After the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest reflection of the U.S. government was to realize the importance of the real economy in the national economy, believe that industry is the most important part of national competitiveness, and successively issued a series of national plans, such as the ''Reviving U.S. Manufacturing "Framework", "Advanced Manufacturing Partnership Program" and "Advanced Manufacturing National Strategic Plan" to realize the "Reindustrialization" national strategy.

In 2012, GE, as the leading manufacturing industry in the United States, took the lead in putting forward the concept of "industrial Internet". Relying on the interconnection and analysis software between machines and equipment, GE changed the previous mode of single intelligent equipment, and greatly improved the efficiency of existing industries and created new industries through the combination of high-performance equipment, low-cost sensors, Internet, big data collection and analysis technology.

This idea has a long history. As early as 2005, GE's aircraft engine company was reorganized into GE Aviation, which began the transformation of business model. The company's original business was only to produce aero-engines. Now, by installing numerous sensors on the aircraft, it collects various parameters of the aircraft in real time, and provides airlines with a complete set of solutions for operation and maintenance management, capability assurance, operation optimization and financial planning through big data analysis technology. It can also provide various services such as safety control and navigation prediction. GE has gradually transformed into an out-and-out software company.

Take Alitalia as an example. GE has installed hundreds of sensors on each of their aircraft, which can collect a lot of data such as engine operation, temperature and fuel consumption in real time. After mass analysis using GE software, it can accurately give the ideal control method. With this alone, Alitalia has saved $15 million in fuel costs in 145 aircraft a year. And through these data, the possibility of engine failure can be predicted in advance, and preventive maintenance can be made in advance to avoid flight delays, increased costs, and even greater safety accidents caused by machine failures.

It is through this deep integration of IT technology and equipment that GE has gradually transformed from an equipment manufacturer to an intelligent service provider, and its business model has also transformed from a single equipment sales to an intelligent system supplier that integrates intelligent equipment, intelligent analysis and intelligent decision-making.

Experts generally believe that the value of the industrial Internet will be reflected in three aspects. The first is to improve the efficiency of equipment use, thereby reducing energy waste and partially increasing GDP. The second is to improve the maintenance efficiency of the system equipment and shorten the maintenance time, which is equivalent to improving productivity. Finally, optimize and simplify operations, which is equivalent to liberating more valuable human resources.

GE predicts that if the industrial Internet can increase productivity by 1% to 1.5 per cent per year, it will increase the average income of Americans by 25% to 40% over the next 20 years. If the rest of the world can ensure half of the productivity growth in the United States, the industrial Internet will add 10 trillion to 15 trillion US dollars to global GDP during this period.

To this end, GE established an industrial Internet R & D center in Silicon Valley in 2011, and the current R & D team has reached thousands of people. In 2013, GE announced that it would invest $1.5 billion over the next three years to develop the Industrial Internet. In April this year, GE announced that it would divest most of its financial business worth $363 billion in the next two years, and planned that 90% of GE's profits in 2018 would come from high-return industrial businesses, compared with 58% last year.

From this we can see that the value of the Industrial Internet is not only to promote the transformation of major manufacturers to intelligent manufacturing systems and service providers, but also to create a new high-end real economy with higher profit margins than the financial industry.

open platform

Build intelligent manufacturing "Apple" system

The United States is the invention of the Internet country, the industrial Internet was born on the distinctive brand of the Internet, that is open. Compared with the Internet, the industrial Internet should not only realize the openness between ICT technology fields such as telecommunication network, data storage and transmission, but also realize the openness and integration between manufacturing technology and IT technology.

This is a research and development camp that spans "two IT. In March 2014, GE formed the Global Industrial Internet Alliance (IIC) with IT companies such as IBM, Cisco, Intel and AT&T. The Industrial Internet Alliance adopts an open membership system and is committed to enabling data sharing between various manufacturers' devices. This involves not only Internet network protocols, but also various parameters such as the storage capacity of data in IT systems, interconnected and non-interconnected devices. The aim is to break down technical barriers through the development of common standards, to use the Internet to activate traditional industrial processes and to better promote the integration of the physical and digital worlds. "The aim is to accelerate the development, acquisition and widespread use of connected machines and devices, promote intelligent analysis, and provide assistance to workers." Now, the Industrial Internet Alliance has 167 members.

This is an open system with ecological significance rather than industrial chain significance. In October 2014, GE announced that its industrial Internet Predix platform (equivalent to the operating system of industrial equipment version) was open to all companies in the world, introducing the cooperation mode between the platform and application developers in the Internet field into the industry, so as to provide guarantee for users to rapidly develop custom industry applications on a large scale. This industrial ecosystem, which is highly similar to Apple in the smartphone field, will greatly accelerate the industrial Internet to take root in various segments of the manufacturing industry.

This is a standardization cooperation organization aiming at the global market. At present, China Telecom, Haier, Huawei, China Academy of information and communications, Shenyang Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and other Chinese enterprises and institutions have joined IIC, and will share the most cutting-edge technology and resources with the global industrial Internet industry.

We believe that the purpose of GE and other companies in establishing the Industrial Internet Alliance is to take advantage of the advantages of the United States in information technology, through deep integration with the manufacturing industry, to take the initiative in technical standards and industrial standards, so as to be dominant in global competition. status. So far, the industrial Internet is not the national strategy of the United States, which is in sharp contrast to Germany's strategy of promoting industrial 4.0 with the whole country. However, because many American enterprises within the alliance are responsible for the "re-industrialization" of the United States, one of its technical core is also the CPS cyber physical system, so many scholars have taken the industrial Internet as an industrial strategy equivalent to the industrial 4.0.

The cooperation with China Telecom can be regarded as the first step for the industrial Internet to extend an olive branch to Chinese enterprises. But wait, what can China gain by participating in this new industrial process aimed at revitalizing American manufacturing?

Let's bring our eyes back to the first ecosystem of smart manufacturing-the smart phone platform. In the era of feature phones, Nokia, which has won the first global market share for 15 consecutive years and invested five times as much in research and development as Apple, was defeated in the first battle of smartphone ecology and finally fell in 2013, changing its owner. This is the first can not adapt to the era of intelligent manufacturing giant story. In this story, China is clearly the spectator and the learner, the beneficiary. After Apple soon emerged a new platform with a more open spirit-Android. Through cooperation with Apple, a large number of small and medium-sized developers in China have obtained billions of yuan in application sharing, and have cultivated a large number of software and hardware development teams for the advent of the "Internet" era. With the cooperation with Android and the forge ahead of Chinese mobile phone manufacturers, Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi, Coolpad and other manufacturers have really entered the first camp of global smartphone shipments.

The field of smart manufacturing is likely to reproduce a similar competitive landscape with smart phones. The German Industrial 4.0 and the American Industrial Internet will surely hold up the two most important global platforms for intelligent manufacturing in the future. The author appeals that my country's industry and information and communication industry should attach great importance to the historical opportunities revealed in it, meet each other, join hands to integrate global innovation resources, and promote China's industrial economy to accelerate the realization of intelligent transformation. In comparison, the process of Sino-German industrial 4.0 dialogue is rather slow due to government-led, and has not yet reached the level where heavyweight enterprises join each other's industrial cooperation organizations to jointly promote concept consultation and jointly define the standard system. However, due to its positioning in the open cooperation between enterprises and marketization, the industrial Internet's journey to China has been "late and come first".

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Through the investigation of GE's transformation of intelligent manufacturing with the help of industrial Internet, we find that world-class manufacturing giants have moved from single device intelligence to system intelligence, from simple automation and information leveraging intelligence to deep integration of ICT and equipment leveraging intelligence, thus forming a series of new industrial intelligent services such as device networking, collection, big data analysis, intelligent decision-making, etc. Although GE initiated and formed the Industrial Internet Alliance and took the lead in opening up the Predix platform, a master manufacturer with a relatively single manufacturing model (mainly concentrated in aviation, energy, medical and other fields) may not necessarily develop into a unified industrial application platform controller like Apple. The decentralization of various industrial segments and the complexity of manufacturing technology will make the platform game of intelligent manufacturing and the game of big powers more confusing.

When the U.S. manufacturing giants bravely abandon the financial sector, which is making money every day, and plunge into the flood of intelligent manufacturing without hesitation, intelligent transformation is undoubtedly a new wave of industrial transformation that will change the future pattern. At the same time, we can see that China's listed companies have borrowed huge amounts of money from many new concept circles, most of which go to real estate, finance, especially the stock market. The contrast between them is worthy of our vigilance! (Hu Hu Hu, Zhu Duoxian)