Recent research shows how AI-driven Machine Health systems are at least 20 percent more accurate than legacy alternatives – while also avoiding between 40 and 70 percent of false alerts.

Almost every aspect of our lives today is impacted by artificial intelligence: web searches, e-commerce, health, computer vision, driving, navigation, logistics, the services we consume, financial markets, and even the pictures we take with our smartphones. Why? Because it works. We find what we need more quickly, and the pictures we take are prettier.

State-Of-The-Art Versus State-Of-Before

At Augury, we dealt with AI focused on perfecting the health, availability and performance of large production lines. With a 99% accuracy rate, we are able to save our customers millions of dollars – thanks to our ability to eliminate unexpected production downtime and dramatically reduce repairs costs. And we wouldn’t be able to do this without developing powerful AI algorithms.

Obviously, before deploying Augury’s AI, many of our customers used other ways to minimize unplanned downtime and production losses. And as data enthusiasts, we began wondering if we could calculate the actual additional value of using AI compared to more traditional approaches. 

Real Alerts Versus False Alerts

One such legacy approach is “threshold-based analysis”, which Augury actually uses in some of the measurements we take related to machine vibrations. With threshold-based analysis, an alert would be triggered once a machine’s overall vibration level reached a certain level. Then, ideally, a vibration expert would analyze the data and try to figure out the source of the alert. This differs with Augury’s AI in that we are continuously analyzing the machine’s vibration spectrums with and without regards to the overall vibration levels.

In a threshold-based analysis, there is one crucial decision: Where to set the alert threshold? The higher the threshold is, the more likely it is that a critical production machine will fail unexpectedly. On the other hand, the lower the threshold is, the more false-alerts will be received.

The Experiment

The most common way to determine the threshold level is by using the ISO standard for vibration threshold (e.g., ISO-10816 or equivalent). However, in many cases, users chose to adapt the threshold levels according to their specific needs.

With our research, we decided to compare Augury’s AI to both ISO thresholds and custom thresholds. Led by Daniel Barsky and Nadav Dishon from Augury’s algorithms and data teams, the study was performed on over 29,000 event detections coming from over 90,000 critical machines monitored by Augury globally over a period of six months.

And while we witness the benefits of Augury’s AI during our day-to-day interaction with our customers, we were still astonished by the results.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Out of the 99% verified AI malfunctions detected, the ISO threshold system “caught” 90% of the malfunctions. This sounds great until you discover the ISO system also “caught” an additional 70% false-alert malfunctions. This means that if a production facility was to use the ISO threshold system, the facility’s maintenance team would have spent 70% of their time chasing after malfunctions that do not exist. Needless to say, the facility’s team would quickly lose confidence with such a system and ignore all further alerts.

For this very reason, most users prefer to set-up their own thresholds in the hopes of reducing the number of false alerts. So, we compared Augury’s AI with an advanced threshold approach. The results were indeed better in the term of false alerts: there were now “only” 40% false alerts. But this came at a cost since now only 80% of the faults were detected. And again, with a maintenance team spending 40% of its time chasing non-existent malfunctions, all confidence would be soon lost with such a monitoring system.  

The Hidden Benefits Of Continuous Improvement

And when we started crunching more numbers, we also discovered that by detecting 20% more problems, you in fact increase savings and ROI by 30%. This is because applying AI also has other trickle-down advantages besides increased accuracy and decreased false alerts. It can also have other benefits in terms of safety, scalability and saving human time that can be used for more proactive activities.

So, in short, thanks to on-going technological advancements, AI is becoming available in more and more aspects of our lives. It’s certainly helping humanity in the way we can more efficiently manufacture our food & beverages, medicine, energy and much more.

And in further good news: our efforts have only just begun.

Read The White Paper ‘The Power of Augury’s AI’. Or to learn more about how our AI is making the jobs of manufacturers easier, get in touch today.

The post Why AI? Because It Works Better Than Previous Technologies appeared first on Augury.

Like many companies, Augury faced numerous challenges with the COVID-19 crisis. However, by following a ‘People First’ philosophy and being transparent internally in how we dealt with our business health, we were still able to scale.

No Sensors, No Future

Augury provides Machine Health services for various industrial sectors – from food & beverages to chemicals, from forestry to utilities. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were forced to focus on our Business Health to ensure that we would survive.

The threat to the company was indeed existential. At the time, Augury was just proving its long-term sustainability. It became crucial to take care of future financing and continue sales and business growth.

And to provide machine health diagnostics to new clients, we needed to get on-site to install our sensors. Without these sensors in place, we could provide no solutions…

By Putting People First, Everyone Wins

In Hebrew, the word “company” is the same word as for “society”. For the team, Augury is both.

Before the pandemic, our employees were equally divided between Israel (R&D) and the US (HQ). Most of us were working from our offices on a daily basis. Only a small portion of our employees are spread across the US – working “in the field” – and therefore often already home-based.

With all our employees, Augury follows “People First” guidelines that embrace agility, cooperation and creativity across the team. And so, our first response to the crisis was the right response: make sure all employees and their families were safe.

Change it up (AKA: Adaptability is Key)

It was decided that everyone should work from home. We also reassured everyone that layoffs were not planned.

The company launched an internal campaign called “The New Normal”, which encouraged employees to update a space in their homes into a small working station. An allowance was provided to purchase any necessary equipment. Employees were encouraged to share pictures and videos of their efforts in the form of a friendly competition.

As we began to work remotely, it became clear: “Adaptability is key” during Covid-19, says Augury’s VP of People Operations’. For instance, many of the larger regular meetings were cancelled since not everyone could be available at the same time due to family constraints (children are wonderful but they can also distract). Other norms and more casual forms of communication arose. Our Slack became increasingly active – with both professional and more personal interaction.

Meanwhile, other internal changes were also made. For instance, we future-proofed the offices to better enable the working in capsules once we could return (as nicely described by our creative Adi Shaul in this article in Hebrew).

Maintaining Business Health

In parallel to maintaining employee satisfaction and health, the company was extremely transparent about how they would deal with its business health.

One major decision was to move immediately forward on the next (fourth) funding round, as opposed to waiting a year as we had originally planned.

Naturally, we were concerned about sales taking a heavy hit (even though, down the road, the opposite would prove true). We also worried about how our investors would manage their finances (this was before banks and governments took steps to ensure that money kept flowing to the markets).

So management decided to make temporary wage cuts until the funding round was secured.

Making Cuts While Maintaining Motivation

These cuts were progressive (i.e., the higher your “rank”, the higher the cut). They also came with the promise that once the funding round was secured, the cuts would stop and partly reimbursed.

This fiscal measure – and the reasoning behind it – were communicated clearly to all employees. As a result, the wage cuts were accepted and fully understood by everyone. In fact, team motivation had never been higher. Productivity even increased (as much as was technically possible during the lockdown periods).

Negotiating the New Real World

Meanwhile, we also needed to update our products and services to deal with the external world at large: to deal with the new rules and market realities.

In particular, we needed to figure out how to support remote installations by customers. This process has already been nicely described in Adapting to COVID-19 Restrictions: Remote Guided Installations and Quarantines? Social distancing? In the COVID-19 era, Israeli Industry 4.0 startups find creative ways to install their technologies remotely.

And I am more than happy to report: it worked.

Real World Results

Thanks to all these steps and the accompanying internal communication and transparency, Augury was able to rise above an unparalleled medical crisis:

• We increased sales and profit margins thanks to a motivated and adaptable team.
• This agility backed by tangible results solidified our funding efforts: Augury taps $55M for tech that predicts machine faults from vibration, sound and temperature.
• And with this funding, the company is scaling: hiring 50 new employees over the past year and with 50 more planned for 2021.

Needless to say, salaries are back to normal. I can also confirm our internal Slack communications are as bubbly and inspiring as ever.

But we still can’t wait to see each other – and our clients – in the flesh again.

If you want to taste more of our optimism, do watch our videos: Augury End Year Message and Thank You to Our Everyday Heroes.

The post People First: How Augury Was Transformed By Crisis appeared first on Augury.