Want to see production problems before they hit you? Say hello to predictive maintenance

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How to use smart data analysis to predict the future and increase OEE

In our last blogpost, we covered how to optimize your OEE by looking at both telemetric data and event data. We showed you how you can avoid looking through hours, days, and months of data just to find out if something happened on your production line. By looking at events too, you can find out exactly when something happened and where It happened – and that will give you the key to why it happened. 

So far so good. Now let’s take it one step further and look at how to prevent an unwanted event from happening again. 

Enter: The Rule Engine

One thing is collecting data, another is using them in a smart way. To do that, we need to add a new layer of intelligence to our production system. We already have the tools to collect telemetric data and event data – now we need to add the tool to analyze it, learn from it, and teach what we’ve learned back to the machine. We call that tool the Rule Engine – here is how it works. The Rule Engine allows us to define a series of parameters and ask the system to categorize them as events. We can combine any number of parameters and create events. We can make simple ones that will cause an event if “value a” becomes greater than “value b”. Or we can create more complicated ones that cause an event if “value a” becomes greater than “value b” over a period of time (c)  and combined with parameters x, y, z. These new events will trigger an alarm whenever something is about to get out of control – and that’s how you see problems before they hit you.

A step closer to machine learning

We started by logging events and learning from the data that was supplied for us through telemetry and events. Based on what we learned from that data, we can generate new events and teach our learnings back to the system. We now have knowledge about our production set-up that we didn’t even have when the machine was built. This is where machine learning starts, and the advantages are very tangible.

Intelligent production is visible on the bottom line

There are two major advantages of adding intelligence to your production system in the form of data analysis and rule creation:

  1. Your production system becomes increasingly smarter and better at discovering irregularities that could turn into problems if they are not handled in due time. This can have a major positive impact on your OEE 
  2. Instead of spending your time looking for problems in a sea of data, you now have an alarm system that alerts you before something unwanted happens. That frees up a lot of your time – what will you do with that time that can benefit your business?

Get in touch

Please contact us to find out more about how data collection and data analysis can help your business perform even better. We are eager to tell you about our software solution called CATCH.AI which can help improve your OEE drastically. 

The company behind CATCH.AI

CIM makes end-to-end software solutions that enable our customers to make business-critical decisions based on solid data. We create the necessary connections between data acquisition, data analyses, and data presentation so our customers can efficiently and consistently create products of superior quality – and make decisions based on true insights.