Machine health solutions provider Augury recently introduced new capabilities and enhancements enabling operations and maintenance personnel to remotely monitor, diagnose and share information about the health and performance of the critical machinery.
At a time when Gartner estimates that in a pandemic over 40% of factory staff, including maintenance, reliability and operations staff will be off sick for extended periods with many others working from home, Augury's new offering enables more work from home opportunities. By leveraging Augury AI, these key professionals can keep production process up and running to meet increased demand, despite reduced workforces and potential scarcity of spare parts.
Among the new enhancements released, users will now have access to a new feature called Augury Threads, for Augury customers currently using Halo sensors. This collaboration tool lets maintenance teams, reliability experts and operations teams share analytics, insights, recommendations and actions about critical machines from anywhere in the world. This will ensure manufacturers keep critical assets performing at their best, even when the teams that support them are being held out of the facilities themselves.
Augury CEO Saar Yoskovitz tells IndustryWeek that the Threads feature allows for maintenance/reliability teams and plant leaders to collaborate remotely, which is very helpful in response to COVID-19.
“Within Threads, teams can make more informed machine health decisions with easy access to current machine health conditions and an interactive historical view of an individual asset’s performance,” he says. “This historic view displays previous reliability discussions, repairs and activities for each asset. Manufacturers can use this to know exactly what has happened to the machine in the past and how their team corrected the issue. This context can help manufacturers uncover blind spots and trends that may have been overlooked and can help their teams contribute while working from home. The new feature also allows direct access to Augury’s machine health and reliability experts and can be used to verify repair effectiveness due to continuous monitoring/diagnosis.”
Augury is also providing increased support for remote on-boarding of new personnel and machines, so companies can be sure all the needed expertise from anywhere in their organization is readily accessible in order to keep all critical machinery running at peak levels, no matter what demands are being placed on it.
“When it comes to working from home for office workers and similar professionals, there’s a host of collaboration and productivity tools available,” says Yoskovitz. “But for the people that manage and maintain critical machinery, similar tools have not previously been available. With our announcements and recent improvements, we’re making it possible for companies to not have to choose between prioritizing the health of their critical machines and the safety of their people. This is even more important as those companies are asked to stretch their capacity to deliver the paper products, water, home care goods and other necessities that are proving to be more essential now more than ever.”
Other improvements to the Augury platform include:
- More Powerful Remote Diagnostics - improved machine health and anomaly-based alerts, with deeper root cause analysis and prescriptive maintenance recommendations.
- Remote Feedback & Troubleshooting - improvements to the speed and functionality of diagnostic feedback on repairs. Maintenance actions can be validated in near-real time by logging a repair and initiating a conversation with an Augury machine health expert.
- Remote View of Machine History - past machine health events are more actionable when combined with the new Augury Threads feature. Now there is a better single place to track the full history of a machine’s performance and the expert reliability conversations around it.
- Remote Machine Health Support by Experts - better and faster access to Augury’s machine health experts to help make enhanced reliability-focused decisions in the right context.