In today’s hypercompetitive manufacturing environment, optimizing and maintaining production processes to avoid disruptive slowdowns and costly downtime related to equipment failure is critical to competitiveness. Manufacturers need to maximize ‘up time’ across the production environment in order to ensure speed, efficiency, decision making and cost management. Reliance on traditional manual processes to monitor equipment is no longer effective in the race to compete in the digital economy. Manufacturers need a real-time view into production and new capabilities to anticipate and respond to issues before trouble strikes. Data-driven maintenance optimization using artificial intelligence is the way forward.

Taking a new route to efficiency

AI is breaking new ground for a growing number of manufacturing businesses by providing unprecedented tools to both analyze data related to production operations and identify equipment that could soon fail and bring processes to a standstill. As AI delivers a real-time view of equipment or parts that are at risk of failure, maintenance teams are alerted on the need to take action and maintain smooth operations. The key is AI’s ability to continually access and analyze both historical and current data in ways that instantly evaluate equipment performance, production efficiency and the need for maintenance as it arises.
 

Key features & benefits

  • Lower costs as manufacturers focus on repairs and equipment replacement before costly failures that delay or disrupt production.
  • Improvement of processes thanks to AI’s ability to identify areas for improvement or modernization that will ultimately enhance efficiency.
  • Prioritizing key maintenance needs to ensure that critical repairs are not delayed, including automated ordering of parts and equipment.
  • Improved lifecycle management as AI delivers data-based insights that can help extend the use of equipment that will be very costly to repair or replace.

Conclusion

As AI continues to emerge in the area of predictive maintenance among manufacturers, we are seeing progress centered primarily among larger leading businesses today. While smaller and mid-size businesses are exploring AI’s potential to enhance maintenance capabilities and drive critical new efficiencies, there remains much ground to cover in the race to transform capabilities and remain competitive.

Our advice to manufacturers? Begin the journey without delay by focusing on the small initial steps that they can pursue using the vast capabilities of AI. CGI’s AI specialists can help businesses of every size – including mid-size and smaller players as they address the need to innovate.

As a business-driven team that designs custom AI models to help solve each client’s unique challenges in the fast-changing digital economy, our specialists can provide an initial assessment of how AI can automate maintenance programs and provide continuous real-time visibility across the manufacturing environment. We integrate specialized AI models with software engineering best practices and standards, including data privacy and security compliance, to make every client’s business future-ready. CGI takes a scientific approach to evaluating AI, with a design focus to accelerate time to insights while maintaining human decision-making for responsible AI use.