What's New

This section provides highlights of product changes in V5.0.0.0.0.

• The main navigation menu has been enhanced to provide better user experience. You can now pin your favourite module, search for a module, or sort modules by folder or alphabetically.
• To improve user experience, Translation Management module has been redesigned.
  • The user interface has been updated to a grid view where you can:
    • View the current and original translations.
    • Filter the translations.
    • Edit the translations.
  • Translation downloads now run in the background.
• To enhance usability, in RBI, the following user interface changes are implemented to provide improved customer experience:
  • Left pane tree navigation within RBI view of an asset and process unit enabling you to access components and their analysis.
  • Collapsible sections in RBI Overview page providing access to relevant information in a single page and reducing the effort of multiple clicks.
  • Asset Info that can includekey asset indicators from different modules within a configurable information card for better decision making.
  • Inventory Groups information accessible in the RBI Overview page.
• The Integrity Mobile application is revamped with a new look and enhanced features. The new version include the following benefits:
  • Enhanced and more friendly user interface that will be supported across major platforms.
  • Inspections planning in a mobile device. In the next phases, inspectors will be able to view inspection tasks and create inspections on mobile devices, enabling themto execute inspections in the field.
  • Annotation of images, enabling inspectors to annotate the sections of an asset where damage is found and capture real-time observations.
• To enhance usability in the Thickness Monitoring module, 2D visualization capability will be introduced. This feature provides the following benefits:
  • Corrosion Analysis data on a Two-dimensional image providing you a better perspective on analysing corrosion data, identifying the position of critical Thickness Measurement Locations (TMLs) easily, and taking preventive actions.
  • Availability of vital information such as TML ID, Minimum Thickness, Controlling Corrosion Rate, Last Measurement Value, and Last Measurement Date
  • Additional enhancements such as defining mapping points, markers, pan, and zoom to enhance user experience.
  • Multiple image formats to display corrosion data.

• To enhance performance and usability in the Record Manager module, the Bulk Data Form is updated. The updated grid view provides the following new features:
  • You can use search and sort to find relevant records.
  • The default rows per page will be increased from 25 to 50 records.
  • You can change the rows per page.

• The product names of GE Digital APM have been changed as follows:

  Table 1. New product names

  Old Name	New Name
  APM Classic	On-Premises APM
  Predix APM	Cloud APM
  Predix Essentials	Essentials

  Note: The product UI and documentation will be updated with the new names in a later version.
• Next generation APM Connect Data Loaders with enhanced ability to import records from external sources into GE Digital APM has been released. The existing APM Connect Data Loaders have been rearchitected to provide improved user experience, dynamic classifications and types, improved performance, data and process error visibility at the record level, and better state management. Data Load is now termed as Ingestion Bundles and the batches are called as Slices. The new feature provides the following benefits:
  • A common dashboard for all modes of data loads, manual, EAM, and ADL.
  • A summary sheet with details of all ingestion stats in colourful iconography.
  • The Details section showcases the Process Activity within the Ingestion process and the consolidated counts of records processed.
  • The Details section also categorizes the errors as System, Rejected, or Warning. These errors can be downloaded in JSON format instead of standard text.
  • For the manual upload, now there is a mechanism to ingest complex classification instances in the GEDA Asset Model.
  • A new ingestion engine that can be scaled if required.
• Advanced Visualization module has been introduced in GE Digital APM and provides you a powerful way to visualize and collaborate on the data that is available within GE Digital APM Classic by connecting, aggregating, and analyzing data through business intelligence (BI) like capability.
• To facilitate improved scalability and performance, a new rest based scheduler service is now used to schedule and manage all background jobs in GE Digital APM. It also includes a new Job Monitoring Dashboard that displays the status of various jobs that are scheduled in the GE Digital APM system, allowing you to cancel the scheduled jobs or purge data on this page based on the Security Groups that you are assigned.
• To enhance the accuracy of selecting Potential Degradation Mechanisms (PDMs) in RBI, auto screening feature for PDMs is introduced. This feature provides the following benefits:
  • Default suggestions for potential degradation mechanisms at RBI Component level. Bulk suggestion at a more granular level, such as the Asset and Corrosion loop level.
  • Suggestions based on policies that are configurable as per your organization needs.
  • Analytic-driven results. Data leverage from RBI components to provide close to accurate suggestions of potential degradation mechanisms based on qualitative analysis of the data.
  • The first phase includes suggestions on Thinning degradation mechanisms as a baseline offering.
• To enhance usability in RBI, an alternative Inspection Planning process is introduced. This feature provides the following benefits:
  • Enhanced reconciliation of RBI strategies and implementation, along with flexibility to manage inspection plans without the need to create recommendations.
  • Concept of Inspection Plan details that will capture details of RBI Date, Plan Date, RBI Component, Risks from active analysis.
  • Bulk approval of inspection plans.
  • The first phase includes Inspection plan management for RBI module.
• To enhance usability in Inspection Management module, State Management for Inspection events is introduced. This feature provides the following benefits:
  • State Management for Inspection event as a baseline offering, enabling you to transition from customization to standardization.
  • Consistency in configuration of the Inspections states due to standardization, thus avoiding various issues that arise due to customization.
  • Consistency across major Inspection workflows like Inspection Event and Inspection Recommendation.
  • Clear approval processes for different workflows of same module.

• The Content Change Management module has been deprecated.
• The APM System Monitoring feature has been deprecated. This feature does not have functionalities and capabilities available in 3rd party tools and is not widely used by our current customer base. At this time, there is no plan to replace the APM System Monitoring feature in GE Digital APM. We request all our customers to leverage 3rd party tools that provide similar functionality and not implement the APM System Monitoring feature for existing or future releases.
• GE Digital is committed to continuous improvement of the user experience of APM. The bulk data form and master-detail form in Record Manager is upgraded to use standard data grids. This enhancement enables a significant perfomance improvement and addresses a number of usability issues and enhancement requests. As a result of this change, the Freeze Rows feature is no longer available in the bulk data form and master/detail form.
• Policy Designer and Family Policies Execution History Storage Upgrade

  Table 2. Policy Designer and Family Policies Execution History Storage Upgrade

  Service(s)/Version(s)	Policy Designer Family Policy
  Effective Date	December 2022
  Affected Points of Presence	US-West, Frankfurt

  What does this mean to Customers

  GE Digital appreciates and values your business. As part of our ongoing efforts to continuously improve our product offerings, GE Digital is introducing a new storage solution for Policy Designer and Family Policy execution history details. This will reduce the load on the APM database servers and improve the performance of the APM user interface when accessing execution history records.

  To facilitate the upgrade, GE Digital is planning to remove all existing execution history records prior to performing the database upgrade. This will ensure that customer databases will not be off-line for an extended period to upgrade and transfer old execution history data to the new storage solution. Most customers retain execution history for one month, so there will be a short period of time after the upgrade where users do not have access to the usual amount of data.

  As a result of this upgrade, you will no longer be able to query the contents of the MI_POLICY_EXEC_LOG.PLOG_DATA_TX field in the policy execution history table using APM Queries, since this data will be stored separately from the APM relational database.

  What will happen to existing data?

  Existing policy execution history data will be permanently deleted during the database upgrade process.

  What other changes are expected?

  For new policy executions after the upgrade is completed, detailed execution history results in JSON format will be stored in Amazon AWS S3 buckets. This detailed data will be retrieved from the S3 buckets only when required to be displayed in the user interface. There will be no change in how the execution details are displayed in Policy Designer and Family Policy.

  To accommodate other planned changes in this release, policy execution history records created after the upgrade will use updated formats for certain embedded hyperlinks. There will be no change in the function of the hyperlinks.

  User Actions

  Users should check their configured queries for any references to the MI_POLICY_EXEC_LOG.PLOG_DATA_TX field. These will no longer function as expected after the upgrade.

  If this change may impact your existing workflows, or you have other concerns about the upcoming change, please reach out to GE Digital support, so that we can address your concerns and make sure to keep you informed with additional details of the upcoming changes.