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Manufacturing Optimization

Optimizing Depots and the Industrial Base

Providing decisive advantages to the warfighter begins with optimizing throughput inside the defense industrial base. Manufacturing optimization means surfacing and applying insights faster and more effectively from systems, processes, and people—a level of performance made possible by AI-enabled systems.
INVESTING IN EFFICIENCY GAIN
$21Bn
US Navy estimate of budget required to implement Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan (SIOP).
IMPROVING TIME TO VALUE
50%
Amount of person-hours saved on testing by implementing an AI-based visual inspection solution.
REDUCING DOWNTIME
240 Hrs
Average 10 days advance warning of impending machine failures enabled by AI predictive maintenance solutions.

DoD depots, shipyards, and aerospace and defense manufacturers are complex environments with numerous variables that impact quality, efficiency, regulatory compliance, worker safety, and environmental sustainability requirements.

Minimizing asset failures and accidents is critically important to maintaining production tempo and managing costs. But most of the industry still relies on preventive maintenance to avert failures, checking and repairing assets at pre-scheduled intervals. This is preferable to allowing assets to otherwise fail, but inherently wasteful, burning valuable time and resources on assets that may not need repair, while still often failing to catch unexpected or unusual failures.

Machine learning that leverages sensor data defense manufacturers already have enables a better approach—predictive maintenance—detecting true-positive emerging asset failures before they occur with time to schedule cost-effective maintenance while leaving alone normally-behaving assets. Further, by incorporating unstructured data, maintenance solutions are able to ingest historical records and service manuals, as well as past courses of action taken by subject matter experts. Using this diverse set of data, the solution can speed up maintenance processes by listing possible next steps and suggesting corrective measures, closing the loop on typically unfinished jobs.

How AI Optimizes Manufacturing Efficiency

Improving Performance

By leveraging historical records like work instructions and job guides, manufacturing staff improve time to resolution when addressing true positive alerts.
  • Reduce idle time and stoppages.
  • Increase OJT efforts.
  • Resolve gaps in workforce skills.

Enhancing Safety

Monitoring and alerting on safety issues in real time using autonomous computer vision solutions prevents injury and downtime.
  • Ensure PPE compliance.
  • Analyze field reports for potential hazards.
  • Mitigate dangerous equipment failures.

Boosting Efficiency

Identifying and alerting on asset issues allows the industrial defense base to improve throughput and reduce overall cost of the value chain.
  • Receive advance notice of failures.
  • Extend asset lifetimes.
  • Optimize process efficiency.

Solving the Problem

Avathon Industrial AI platform provides a scalable solution that harnesses the power of AI to enable real-time KPI monitoring, proactive maintenance systems, and 360° visibility into operations, enabling defense manufacturers to extract actionable insights from configurable data pipelines connected to structured and/or unstructured datasets. Perfected over ten years of real-world engagements, our Industrial AI platform has yielded valuable outcomes in past deployments, including the ability to increase production efficiency by up to 20%, alert on pending failures days, if not weeks, in advance, and avoid potentially millions of dollars in maintenance costs.