AI and the Future of Maintenance

I did some work with a industrial company recently and they are in the testing space and one of the things that

they wanted to do was narrow the window for maintenance right so you have these big industrial machines and you have these factors of production quality

labor and inventory and if you take a machine down for too long or at the wrong time it interrupts the production line and you don't get as much stuff out the back or you interrupt it at a time

and introduce a new variable and you bring down the quality you also have to think about who can repair the machine and when are they available there's all this stuff that has to happen and of course the answer to all of that is that

we're going to use AI to figure out that complex coordination of all of these resources right and typically today most

companies and they still do this have a guy with a clipboard and sometimes maybe a manual tester walk out to a machine and see how it's doing right they have

these things called walking paths and literally and this is knowledge transfer from one generation to the next they go we're gonna walk around to the Machine

take some notes and get some feedback we got others feedback in that one and and then we take those paper notes and we go upload them someplace and maybe if

you're really sophisticated you use your iPad or mobile device and you upload it in real time and maybe you do something where you analyze that information you

say well something that we got to go fix on that machine most machines today are still on scheduled maintenance right so you get a manual and the manual says

every six months do this thing and every six months you do that thing and again that's a little easier to schedule you can you know okay we're gonna go in on Saturday morning we're gonna it's downtime we're gonna fix that but what

we're finding is that machines live in the real world we kind of always known that and the AI people and the IOT people are going let's just outfit them all with sensors right let's put all these

sensors on this machine sound vibration stress pressure level sensors you know is it still level on the ground smoke and gas sensors in the environment right because you can have all this stuff that

happens and what they're finding is that if I take a machine I go it should be serviced every six months and I stick it in another environment with higher humidity or different heat signatures maybe I have to do it every three months

right and you think about what your car does if most of us now have automobiles that are saying your oil needs to be changed it's like thirty four percent

it's not every 3,000 miles or whatever your maintenance program is supposed to be your car now tells you that you have a percentage less and that's based on

your driving patterns if you drive hard and fast versus slower and in less frequently it's going to change that percentage and so what we end up with is a lot of sensors with a lot of

information and this is a place where you have to have some knowledge management input because what are those sensors doing what makes sense have you

analyzed the situation because that guy with the clipboard doesn't know about these sensors right these are new these are being sold by new vendors coming into the space saying I think we have

this idea right sometimes they're not new vendors or places like General Electric but what they're even General Electric is finding that it's a hard sell because you've got these people who know these machines they can literally

walk up anybody watching the the haunting of Hill House everybody's going now I'm not watching that one of the characters can touch stuff and feel

things and that's what industrial test maintenance guys can do they can walk up to a machine going it's vibrating too much and they can sense that because they've been doing it for twenty years

and now we can put these sensors on that so there's also this whole transition issue of the are we going to have displaced workers because the guy whose senses it can now be replaced by a

sensor right but that whole knowledge piece of the what are all these things that we can do including is as I was alluding to earlier with the walking around I can now put cameras all around it I

can put water sensors I can just see the machine I don't have to go walk up to it [Music] [Applause] [Applause]