Published on: May 2026
BIG DATA IN INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING:A CASE STUDY OF GENERAL ELECTRIC'S PREDIX™ PLATFORM
Piyush Doifode
Prof. Avishek Das
Article Status
Available Documents
Abstract
The exponential growth of industrial sensor data has compelled large-scale manufacturers to fundamentally rethink their data infrastructure strategies. This paper examines how General Electric (GE) — one of the world's largest diversified industrial corporations — confronted the challenge of managing, processing, and deriving value from machine-generated data at unprecedented scale. Through a structured case-study methodology, this paper analyses GE's development and deployment of the Predix™ Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform, including its integration with Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. The paper maps each of GE's Big Data initiatives — predictive maintenance, real-time equipment monitoring, aviation fuel optimisation, wind farm management, and digital twin technology — against established Big Data frameworks, including the three Vs (Volume, Velocity, Variety), Hadoop/MapReduce distributed processing, NoSQL storage architectures, and the descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics hierarchy. Findings indicate that GE's $1 billion investment in data infrastructure generated substantial operational benefits: issue resolution times decreased from weeks to days, wind farm energy output improved by two to five per cent, and individual customers avoided multi-million-dollar unplanned outages. The study also identifies the key implementation challenges GE encountered — including scalability, latency, data security, talent acquisition, and system integration — and documents the solutions applied. The paper concludes that Big Data transformation in heavy industry requires not only technological investment but also organisational commitment, talent strategy, and a willingness to reimagine the product from hardware to data-driven services.
How to Cite this Paper
Doifode, P. (2026). Big Data in Industrial Manufacturing:A Case Study of General Electric's Predix™ Platform. International Journal of Creative and Open Research in Engineering and Management, <i>02</i>(05). https://doi.org/10.55041/ijcope.v2i5.275
Doifode, Piyush. "Big Data in Industrial Manufacturing:A Case Study of General Electric's Predix™ Platform." International Journal of Creative and Open Research in Engineering and Management, vol. 02, no. 05, 2026, pp. . doi:https://doi.org/10.55041/ijcope.v2i5.275.
Doifode, Piyush. "Big Data in Industrial Manufacturing:A Case Study of General Electric's Predix™ Platform." International Journal of Creative and Open Research in Engineering and Management 02, no. 05 (2026). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.55041/ijcope.v2i5.275.
References
- Amazon Web Services. (2016). GE Power uses AWS to unlock the power of industrial IoT data. Amazon Web Services Case Studies. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/ge-power/
- Beyer, M. A., & Laney, D. (2012). The importance of 'big data': A definition. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/2057415
- Bharadwaj, A., El Sawy, O. A., Pavlou, P. A., & Venkatraman, N. (2013). Digital business strategy: Toward a next generation of insights. MIS Quarterly, 37(2), 471–482. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2013/37:2.3
- Cattell, R. (2011). Scalable SQL and NoSQL data stores. ACM SIGMOD Record, 39(4), 12–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978542.1978544
- Davenport, T. H., & Dyché, J. (2013). Big data in big companies. International Institute for Analytics. https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/en_us/doc/whitepaper2/big-data-in-big-companies-106461.pdf
- Davenport, T. H., & Harris, J. G. (2007). Competing on analytics: The new science of winning. Harvard Business School Press.
- Dean, J., & Ghemawat, S. (2004). MapReduce: Simplified data processing on large clusters. Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI '04), 137–150. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1327452.1327492
- Digital Vidya. (2016). How General Electric built big data software analytics for the industrial internet. https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/general-electric-ge-built-big-data-software-analytics-for-industrial-internet/
- General Electric. (2016). GE big data & analytics. GE Official Website. https://www.ge.com/taxonomy/term/1664
- Ghemawat, S., Gobioff, H., & Leung, S.-T. (2003). The Google file system. Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '03), 29–43. https://doi.org/10.1145/945445.945450
- Grieves, M., & Vickers, J. (2017). Digital twin: Mitigating unpredictable, undesirable emergent behavior in complex systems. In F.-J. Kahlen, S. Flumerfelt, & A. Alves (Eds.), Transdisciplinary perspectives on complex systems (pp. 85–113). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38756-7_4
Ethical Compliance & Review Process
- •All submissions are screened under plagiarism detection.
- •Review follows editorial policy.
- •Authors retain copyright.
- •Peer Review Type: Double-Blind Peer Review
- •Published on: May 08 2026
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You are free to share and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes with proper attribution.

