Digital Transformation of Service Operations in Manufacturing

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Across the globe, but especially in Europe and the US, the manufacturing industry is going through a significant digital transformation to remain competitive. In almost all cases, investments are made into digital automation of service operations to become more proactive, and more customer-personalised to drive service growth, reduce service costs, and optimise the TCO for the end customer. By rolling out proactive asset health monitoring and automation initiatives, industrial asset manufacturers guarantee asset uptime as part of their service contracts. 

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Over the past 10 years, the Waylay platform’s digital twin modelling features have allowed our customers to roll out AI-powered predictive asset health monitoring rules and automation flows for connected assets. This has brought them the following tangible operational benefits:

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• For every 10K assets in the field, immediate savings are expected to amount to 2.25M EUR per year.
• Reducing response time from 24h+ to several minutes using proactive alerting
• A typical accuracy of 80% in predicting machine shutdowns and customer complaints over the next 5 days.
• Warranty cost reduction by a factor of 4 when the machine issue is addressed before failure
• 45% less time spent per work order due to the proactive root cause analysis and recommended actions taken.
• Autocorrelation of asset issues shrinks the volume of work orders by 35%+.

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Proactive Service Operations with automated job scheduling

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The initial roll-out of proactive service operations typically involves the activation of connected asset data analysis rules to detect suboptimal asset operational conditions in real-time, paired with business processes that alert dedicated proactive service operations personnel and customers to predictive asset health recommendations. In this first phase, a human is often in the loop to triage the proactive alerts to determine the next best action to take, e.g. to schedule a maintenance visit. Once trust in the algorithms and use cases has been established, the second phase often bypasses this human triaging and goes straight for the full automation of the end-to-end business process. 

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The latter part often involves scheduling the right on-site maintenance job at the right time to guarantee the asset uptime - and this is where a dynamic field scheduling and embedded route planning application comes into the picture. The field scheduling application is a crucial bridge between issue detection and resolution, ensuring seamless action after Waylay automation technology identifies asset problems. By optimising resource allocation and automating task assignments, it minimises delays, reduces downtime, and improves operational efficiency. This ensures that the right personnel and tools are deployed promptly, enhancing customer satisfaction and maintaining service quality as operations scale. With real-time updates and data-driven coordination, it transforms insights from automation into swift, effective field responses, maximising the value of connected assets.

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Waylay has teamed up with FLS – FAST LEAN SMART, developer of the world-leading AI automated field service planning software FLS VISITOUR. Waylay feeds the FLS scheduling engine with the necessary data to schedule field visits efficiently, and in real-time. 

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This includes:

• Job priority, including critical in-day response capability
• Grouping proactive issues into a single visit
• The spare parts required for the job
• The estimated time of the job duration, with self-learning functionality for future planning
• The predicted time to failure
• Required field operative skills
• Optimised time-of-day routing

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The FLS VISITOUR engine will now schedule and assign maintenance jobs taking into account:

• Availability of field service resources with the necessary skills and certification
• Existing jobs planned for the asset or other assets at the same location
• Minimised travel time

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The algorithm that powers FLS VISITOUR (PowerOpt) considers the entire workforce schedule at once, bringing the following tangible service operations benefits:

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