ARC conducted an Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning Workshop for a client, providing stakeholder executives with clarity as they moved forward on selecting an appropriate vendor in an emerging market.
Client Challenge
To meet its contractual obligations with its customers while also maintaining sustainable margins, a global industrial company needed to improve its equipment availability and reliability and also decrease its maintenance costs. The company identified advanced analytics solutions, specifically machine learning and predictive techniques, as a means to achieve this critical objective. However, the advanced analytics market was evolving very quickly, characterized by a high level of confusing and misleading marketing. The company had limited knowledge of the many solutions available and how to compare them in meaningful ways. Compounding this challenge was the limited data the company had on failure signatures and codes for its operational assets.
ARC Solution
A senior analyst met with the client’s project lead at ARC’s annual Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida to discuss the company’s analytics strategy, objectives, and potential pilot use cases. Based on the discussion, ARC then conducted an onsite workshop for key stakeholders that included reliability, global operations, productivity, and IT executives. The ARC analyst delivered a comprehensive, unbiased overview of the advanced analytics market and solutions, including presentation of types, architectures, deployment modes, and key issues. Workshop participants had an opportunity to discuss in depth with the ARC analyst the implications of resource availability needed to support a pilot, current operational familiarity with analytics deployments, desire to scale, equipment classes impacted, and use cases.
To ensure that the learning continued to provide ongoing value, ARC supplemented the workshop with an Industrial Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Planning Guide. This guide provided baseline information about the industrial analytics market, vendor profiles, and recommendations for considering analytics projects.
Results
Participants were highly engaged during the workshop. Executives came away with clarity about how the company’s business realities intersected with functional requirements gathering, as well as far more informed as to how to deploy analytics capabilities. The ARC analyst helped company executives understand the two different techniques that would likely be needed to support the pilots. ARC helped solidify the functional requirements for the purchasing process, reducing the time, effort, and cost of creating a vendor short list. Coincidentally, the company was meeting the following day with a vendor profiled in the ARC planning guide. As a result, workshop participants were able to get advanced preparation and ask detailed questions prior to the meeting. Additionally, ARC facilitated a direct introduction with the CEO of a company that provides failure code data that could be leveraged for the company’s analytics initiative.