Predictive maintenance from usage & sound
Maintenance scheduled on fixed calendar dates ignores how hard a machine has actually been worked. A machine running high-stress jobs may be far closer to failure than its service date suggests — and the first human sign is often a new sound or vibration an operator notices but has no quick way to report and triage. The stakes are large: 68% of UK manufacturers suffered unplanned downtime in the past year, at a cost of up to £736 million every week across the sector,31 and unplanned downtime costs materially more per minute than planned maintenance.34
Fixed-calendar servicing misses usage-driven wear; mid-week breakdowns cause expensive unplanned downtime; informal fault reports get lost.
An unplanned breakdown on their job means a missed delivery date.
The agent bridges the ERP assets module and actual usage. It tracks real spindle hours and material hardness processed, and when an operator reports "a new high-frequency whine from spindle two", it logs the anomaly, cross-references recent sensor data, and — where wear indicators cross threshold — raises a pre-emptive maintenance request before failure.
Intervention scheduled before failure; expensive unplanned downtime minimised; operator observations captured and acted on.
More reliable delivery dates, protected from surprise breakdowns.
