How a German Home Appliance Manufacturer could reduce the number of unplanned industrial motor outages by 60%

by | Nov 7, 2020 | Case study | 0 comments

The Opportunity

A global premium appliance manufacturer headquartered in Germany recognized for its unique design and intuitive user experiences knew it was time to upgrade to a more modern factory enabled with 5G. After all, an innovative product should have an innovative manufacturing process to match. The company had embarked on a company-wide digital transformation initiative that included converting one of its current factories into a model factory running on 5G and commissioning new 5G-enabled technologies like AI, IoT, augmented and virtual reality, robotic process automation, and more. The company had three main goals for its factory:

  1. Enable large-scale IoT capabilities
  2. Roll out predictive maintenance and asset tracking
  3. Build a digital twin of the factory

The appliance manufacturer partnered with a Technology Accelerator, which funded startups that were building new products that take advantage of 5G technology, to pilot new projects that addressed its vision for the modernized factory. The manufacturer chose Sensfix as one of its startup partners for running motor health monitoring and automated escalation and ticketing of motor maintenance.

Before Sensfix

The factory chosen to be a 5G-connected model factory, had about 120 industrial motors. Motors were procured from a standard European vendor who offered a standard warranty. About 80% of the motors were outside the warranty period. Whenever a motor (outside the warranty period) developed an issue the production line around that motor would stop. An in-house engineer would be summoned as a first responder who would fix first level issues. Advanced issues would in-turn be outsourced to a third-party maintenance team. On an average it took a few minutes to a couple of hours for the first responder to arrive at the spot. The engineer upon arrival usually conducted few diagnostic procedures to ascertain
the condition of the motor, 
the root cause of the issue, 
If the fix lied under his purview? 
If yes, he opened up the ERP software, referred to service information and provided the fix.
If not, he created a ticket inside the ERP software.
And then it took 24-72 hours for the third-party maintenance team to respond. 

After Sensfix

Sensfix implemented its digital AI workflows modules “SDM – mmAIoT” and “SDM – AI Workflows”. mmAIoT (multimodal AI enabled IoT) was interfaced with Factory’s motor health sensor tapping sensfix’s Gateway/Router level integrability. Sensfix allowed the customers to set up automated onboarding of the motor sensor such that the motor IoT data namely – vibration, temperature and audio were pipelined and fed to sensfix’s mmAI model pool. Customer could choose an AI model of interest and run multimodal predictive maintenance. The chosen AI model would operate on the IoT data and output certain predictions with a corresponding probability. that are shown on a dynamic dashboard. Subsequent silos and workflows after the prediction of motor failure would be automatically triggered over the sensfix platform (among web apps and mobile apps for Plant manager, Supervisor/Engineer, service personnel)

Results and Future Vision

Sensfix successfully demonstrated the power of its IoT, data, and AI capabilities in a 5G factory by creating more efficiency and visibility for the customer’s plant managers. The industrial motor initiative returned tangible results that indicated several potential future issues with the motors. With this information, the manufacturer could address the issues before they affected the manufacturing process. In a full-scale rollout of this technology, the manufacturer could receive factory-wide real-time data about upcoming required maintenance to help eliminate unplanned downtime and reduce the average time to repair.

Summary

A global premium appliance manufacturer selected Sensfix to pilot predictive maintenance and geo-fencing initiatives that took advantage of 5G.