The year 2022 saw Infinite Uptime break newer grounds and reach greater heights. Of course, it’s all thanks to our loyal customers. It is fair to say that we have done our utmost to provide our customers with the best diagnostics service we can. The numbers on the right are a healthy testimony. Today, artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT are the talk of the town and have put the role of AI in predictive maintenance into the spotlight. But in the real world of manufacturing where process parameters and machine conditions change so quickly, one must recognize that not everything is predictable, even with the best AI. And perhaps most importantly: AI is not a replacement for humans. So, whoever knows how to best combine the knowledge in people’s heads with artificial intelligence is on the right track. Our collaboration with Ceat Tyres is a fine example of this, Darshan Desai of Ceat Tyres captures it very well in this edition's guest article. Vamsi Krishna shares his thoughts on always keeping our technology and product focus relevant for our users. By Invitation: Operational Excellence with Real-time Diagnostics Darshan Desai General Manager Engineering, CEAT - Halol At Ceat, we always aim for operational excellence. We have embarked on a digital transformation initiative that will unlock productivity and efficiency gains in our factories. A foundational element to this, is to improve reliability and uptime of our most critical assets which include a variety of mixers, calendar rolls and extruders. At our Halol plant, condition monitoring of all critical rotating equipment has been digitalized which has resulted in significant reduction in sporadic failures to zero. Our maintenance teams today rely on real-time diagnostics to identify potential issues that may lead to equipment failure. Success of this initiative at Halol has now been replicated at all our tyre manufacturing facilities. At our Halol plant, condition monitoring of all critical rotating equipment has been digitalized which has resulted in significant reduction in sporadic failures to zero. The very first step in our digital condition monitoring journey was to pick the right solution – one that has the right sensing capabilities, connectivity, predictive analytics and visualization capabilities to give our engineers a clear line of sight regarding equipment health. The same can also be integrated into our larger digital transformation architecture. A technology leap such as this necessitates careful change management. We have appointed digital champions at each location to help our users adopt this innovation. These champions in turn interact with teams at Infinite Uptime to track technology adoption, progress and assess the project ROI. Adoption of such IOT enabled technologies towards reliability improvement is important to us for overall plant reliability and sustainability. We do appreciate the Infinite Uptime team for partnering and developing effective smart solutions. Worth to mention continual superlative active support from front and back end ensuring safeguarding potential consequences of false positive and false negative aspects as well. Feature in Focus: Machine Health Score Equipment health score, available on your dashboard, is a critical metric for you to understand the health of your equipment based on its vibration characteristics. This health score is a dynamic parameter and is updated every day based on vibration trend, fault frequencies and their magnitude, impact amplitudes for slow speeds and a host of spectral characteristics that your equipment exhibits through vibration. Looking at the health score of your equipment every day is good monitoring practice and a declining health score will keep you prepared for the required corrective action. Follow this thumb rule for health scores the next time you look at your summary dashboard. Health score 80% and above: Action not required. Health score 50% – 80%: Probable presence of defect; based on its severity, a report with fault diagnosis and recommendation may be issued and emailed to you. Health score below 50%: High likelihood of defect; diagnosis and recommendation report shall be issued. If a report has not been issued and emailed, please get in touch with us. Vamsi Krishna VP Engineering – Infinite Uptime Focus drives outcomes: Lessons from our Tech Guru Looking at Infinite Uptime’s phenomenal success, especially, over the past couple of years wherein we have onboarded a record number of plant users, I am often asked what other products or features are we adding to our portfolio? Well, the ability to predict rotating equipment faults is our core and in the best interest of the industry we will continue to hone our strength; we will add more details and context to our diagnostics while operating at a high accuracy rate to be able to save equipment downtime in a scalable way across the enterprise. Our business model of offering end-to-end diagnostics as a service compels us to constantly improve on our value delivery. From the product perspective it means we must continuously innovate on the embedded architecture of our hardware, combat network infra challenges in remote industrial environments, and have a diagnostic dashboard platform that is reliable and super easy – all towards ensuring that we provide advanced, accurate and comprehensive machine diagnostics to our users. Also important in our product development is to keep our technology stack completely integrable with any cloud architecture. This gives our clients the needed flexibility to integrate our solution in their larger digital transformation endeavour. Augmented use of AI will serve to further transform our diagnostic services. And even now, by using our platform, our clients are generating data that improves the solution, and our diagnostics engine gets better all the time. On the other side, analytics helps us understand what is working well for our users and what is not. While we build new capabilities, it is equally important to scrap under-performing features to better focus on solving customer problems. Product innovation in a hyper-growth environment is daunting; I generally assess 4 critical elements as a quick check for our product: whether it is valuable and usable for customers, and whether it is feasible and viable for us to develop. Case Study At India's Largest Aluminium Smelter, Infinite Uptime's Diagnostics uses Shockwave and Total Acceleration to prevent downtime at Gas Anode Plant. For a ball mill in Gas Anode Plant (GAP) rotating at less than 50 RPM, diagnosing gear defects for girth and pinion gears has always been a challenge for vibration experts. GAP is critical to an aluminium smelter since it grinds coke to the particle size required for smelting. Infinite Uptime's prediction engine used Shockwave and Total Acceleration parameters to detect misalignment and increase in backlash between the gear teeth and diagnosed gear meshing issues. Resulting corrective action resulted in vibrations coming down from 63.3 mm/sec to 9.5 mm/sec. A breakdown on this mill can not only result in costly repairs but can halt production for at least 48 hours. A detailed case paper on the event can be found here. Read More Manufacturing's Worst Nightmare The impact of downtime can be broken into 3 categories. A) Tangible costs: lost revenue & repairs B) Intangible costs: brand damage and legal ramifications C) Higher-order costs: human safety and environmental impact Time has come for more organizations to move toward higher levels of predictive Maintenance maturity for better insights to prevent unscheduled downtime. Several recent developments have reduced the barriers to success and these include - cheaper and readily available sensors, higher processing power and data availability, growing pool of analytics talent and an expanding ecosystem of companies who have invested in the necessary IP to further commercialize the predictive-model development process. These advances have improved the business case for a tech-enabled scaled-up predictive maintenance. And from the perspective of scale, you must always think about countering unplanned downtime on a plant-wide scale. Doing otherwise invites blind spots in coverage that come back to haunt you down the road. A comprehensive condition monitoring strategy brings technology and domain expertise together. Feel free to contact us for a thorough audit and begin your digital journey to plant-wide condition monitoring. Get in touch with us: +91 9886452080 Email us at: contact@infinite-uptime.com Infinite Uptime India Pvt. Ltd 5th floor, Vasundhara Space, Aundh, Nagras Road, Pune - 411007, India Infinite Uptime Inc. 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA, USA - 94704 Infinite Uptime MENA Unit No: 3O-01-BA534 Jewellery & Gemplex 3, Dubai, UAE © 2023 Infinite Uptime. All Rights Reserved.