The FINANCIAL -- New solution helps organizations leverage big data to uncover manufacturing and distribution risks, and intervene before costly assetd isruptions occu.
IBM announced new business consulting services and software that, together, help C-Suite decision makers predict and prevent damaging supply chain disruptions.
Through IBM's predictive analytics software and business consulting services, the new solution harnesses big data from instrumented assets and identifies irregularities in the manufacturing process, spots product irregularities, and forecasts a range of asset performance risks before a problem ever arises.
Operating, maintaining, and managing assets throughout their lifecycle is a massive built-in expense, made even more critical by the frequency of unpredicted, catastrophic machine failures. Asset downtime, especially, if unplanned, is a multi-million dollar issue for organizations; and the related unscheduled maintenance costs can range from three to 10 times the cost of scheduled maintenance.
"The world is entering a new era of smart - where decisions will be based on facts, data, and increasingly on the ability to apply analytics to massive data sets and extract very precise business insights," said Fred Balboni, senior partner, Big Data Analytics, IBM Global Business Services. "Companies realize they have a new opportunity to capitalize on big data to address some of the intractable issues of the past, drive new levels of business efficiency, and create new levels of value for their customers. Our data shows us that businesses that are applying analytics to structured and unstructured data are outperforming their competitors in every industry."
Envision the myriad of components that combine to form the complex automobile manufacturing line. How can a decision maker know when it’s time to replace any one of the thousands of machine parts, robots or sensors; and beyond that, how the line - or an oil rig, or a piece of heavy equipment - can be taken off line for maintenance with minimal economic impact? IBM's new solution will uncover these data-driven insights, examining both static and streaming information, combined with analysis of asset sensors correlated with domains such as environmental and facilities monitoring systems.
This new integrated solution analyzes big data from multiple static and streaming sources to make informed decisions by generating predictive statistical models to predict equipment failure conditions and create alerts. The alerts are then displayed on an employee or manager’s tablet, smart phone or browser with recommended corrective actions that should be taken through interactive tools that perform root cause analytics and process improvements.
This new offering is intended to help clients in the Automotive, Electronics, Aerospace, Defense, Manufacturing, Mining, Transportation, Telecommunications and Energy and Utilities industries.
Armed with facts on equipment performance, organizations across a range of industries will anticipate potential failures in their manufacturing systems, supply chains and distribution networks before something goes wrong -- and improve operational efficiency as well as customer satisfaction with proactive responses that prevent or minimize potential issues.
"Analytics technology gives us valuable insight into trends and what we can expect in the future," said Michael Hausser, Director of Asset Management and Supporting Services, Transportation and Public Works Department, City of Cambridge. "We were heading toward a point where reliability of service would be reduced and we’d be beyond our resource capacity to re-actively resolve issues in a timely manner. We are in transition to be more proactive and gain efficiencies in day to day maintenance management activities."
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