Predictive Maintenance and Quality

With IBM® Predictive Maintenance and Quality, you can monitor, analyze, and report on information that is gathered from devices. In addition, recommendations for actions can be generated by Predictive Maintenance and Quality.

IBM Predictive Maintenance and Quality is an integrated solution that you can use to perform the following tasks:

  • Predict the failure of an instrumented asset so that you can prevent costly unexpected downtime.
  • Make adjustments to predictive maintenance schedules and tasks to reduce repair costs and minimize downtime.
  • Quickly mine maintenance logs to determine the most effective repair procedures and maintenance cycles.
  • Identify the root cause of asset failure faster so that you can take corrective actions.
  • Identify quality and reliability issues definitively and in a timely way.

Instrumented assets generate data such as device ID, timestamp, temperature, and status code. This data can be collected and used with maintenance records and other data in models that predict when an asset is likely to fail.

Examples of instrumented assets are manufacturing equipment, mining equipment, drilling equipment, farming equipment, security equipment, cars, trucks, trains, helicopters, engines, cranes, oil platforms, and wind turbines.

For example, an oil refinery is a system that combines thousands of interlocking pieces. It is critical that such a system is able to work safely and efficiently. You can use IBM Predictive Maintenance and Quality to monitor and track the lifecycle of each piece of the refinery, such as each pipe, pump, compressor, valve, furnace, turbine, tank, heat exchange unit, and boiler. Reports give you the information to ensure that you have the necessary parts available and can schedule repairs during periods of inactivity.

Predictive maintenance

In predictive maintenance, you look for patterns in the usage and environmental information for equipment that correlate with failures that take place. This information is used to create predictive models to score incoming new data. You can predict the likelihood of failure. Scores are generated from this information that give you an indication of the health of the piece of equipment. In addition, key performance indicators (KPIs) are collected, which are used for reporting. KPIs help you to identify assets that do not conform to normal patterns of behavior. You can define rules to generate recommendations when a piece of equipment is identified as having a high probability of failure. Recommendations can be fed into other systems so that people are alerted to them automatically.

Predictive quality in manufacturing

Past operations data, environmental data, and historical defect data can be used to identify the causes of elevated defect rates. This information is used in predictive models, so that when incoming data is fed into the models, you can predict the likely defect rates. The predicted values are then used for analysis and reporting and to drive recommendations such as modification to inspection patterns, or recalibration of machinery. Scoring can be done on a near real-time basis.

Predictive Maintenance and Quality can also detect quality and reliability problems faster than traditional techniques.