For a successful Machine Health solution, you need 5 capabilities. Each in themselves is a great step forward. But the real – and measurable – value is in how they interact and build on each other. In other words, you’re missing opportunities if you can’t leverage all 5. For part 4 of this blog series, we put a spotlight on how Engagement & Autonomy fits in the big Machine Health picture.
As ChatGPT nicely summarized it after some polite prompting: “Engagement & Autonomy can enhance the effectiveness of Comprehensive Asset Coverage and Accurate & Prescriptive AI by empowering maintenance technicians to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions based on their own expertise and insights.”
“That’s not bad,” says James Newman, Head of Product and Portfolio Marketing at Augury. “ChatGPT comes close. But I’d be blunter: If you don’t put the user first, the whole enterprise dies. You have to figure out their specific challenges in the day-to-day and build up very specific machine health use cases to make their jobs easier. Only then should you start thinking about the tech you will need to achieve that solution.”
C.A.R.E.S.: The Five Required Capabilities of Machine Health
C: Comprehensive Asset Coverage
A: AI: Accurate & Prescriptive
R: Reach At Global Scale
E: Engagement & Autonomy
S: Services End-To-End
“And sorry for stating the obvious, but in the case of machine health and avoiding downtime, you will never achieve true user Engagement & Autonomy without three other capabilities in place: Comprehensive Asset Coverage, Accurate & Prescriptive AI and End-to-End Services. People will only use a tool if it makes their jobs easier and cuts stress. They need to trust it and also feel like they have their backs covered in terms of support if there are any bumps on the road.”
Why is Engagement & Autonomy important?
Projects fail because users do not trust and adopt them because they often can’t see the “what’s in it for them”. Most machine health solutions are not user-friendly and do not provide the tools and support required to ensure that site and corporate-level users are empowered to use the solution daily.
“Engagement & Autonomy, along with Reach at Global Scale, are the two most important capabilities by which all is measured – the other three capabilities are just essential services that enable these two.”
You Can’t Phone – or Email – It In
So, what does true engagement look like? It’s certainly not about staring at the data in search of anomalies – that should be covered by the AI and supporting VAs. It’s certainly not about waiting for the email telling you when an anomaly is spotted…
“There are a lot of companies with fancy dashboards and user interfaces, but these are simply not used,” says Hari Viswanathan, Director of Product Marketing at Augury. “The reliability engineers just wait for the email to come through. And that may be good enough for avoiding downtime – which of course is always good.”
“But user engagement is also a critical part of the digital transformation journey,” says Hari. “The user has to be at the heart of it since you are going to change the way the business operates and delivers value to customers using technology, data and automation. And if the user is not engaged, you will just have a very expensive gadget that is sitting unused. And as a result you will lose both momentum and the true ROI from digital transformation.”
Fixing The Problem Is Only Half Of It
You really need to build the full machine health cycle, according to Hari. And this goes beyond just identifying and fixing any problems. “After the fix is implemented, we also need to validate a successful repair, with the amount of downtime saved and loss avoided right on the timeline. Do this enough times, you can then zoom out over time to get an overall picture of your plant’s machine health. And this is all part of the process – not something you end up doing later manually on a spreadsheet,” says Hari. “It makes it easy to follow the benefits and celebrate the wins.”
“For those companies sincerely after digital transformation, it’s this user engagement that excites them the most.”
“This machine health cycle loop promotes autonomy because for the first time ever, any person in the organization can log into the platform and intuitively understand the health of their machines and how to fix them – without needing expertise in vibration analysis. Imagine the impact that would have on your ability to make reliability a cross-functional goal, promoting the sharing of best practices and insights across silos.”
When It Comes To Scaling, Seeing is Believing
“I see this firsthand: for those companies sincerely after digital transformation, it’s this user engagement that excites them the most,” says Hari.
“I also believe the quantification of wins in a single system is huge. If someone hears it from a colleague, it really sticks,” says Ryan Delaney, the Manager of Reliability Success Team at Augury. “You are able to show the success you are having to colleagues not only in your facility but also in other facilities. Of course, every facility has their own story and their own justification for it. But it can act as a conversation-starter and collaboration-sparker across facilities in different countries – and it’s all based on real data. They can learn from each other and grow with each other.”
“And I will tell you this, if the needle moves at one facility in terms of reducing maintenance costs, then it’s a no-brainer at the corporate level to try it elsewhere.” says Brielle Fragale, Head of Customer Success.
In short: true user Engagement & Autonomy begets more true user Engagement & Autonomy. And so on…
Thank you for reading the ‘5 Machine Health Capabilities and Their Interactions’ series. It’s a big one :).
Reach out if you want to learn more about how these work with Augury’s machine health solution. And if you missed any installments, here are the other four parts:
1) Comprehensive Asset Coverage
2) Accurate & Prescriptive AI
3) Reach at Global Scale
5) Services End-to-End
