National Instruments Has Developed a Maintenance as a Service Solution

Unplanned downtime is a killer for many businesses which rely on the continuous operation of assets – such as in manufacturing for example – to produce products, serve customers, and keep materials flowing through already embattled supply chains.

According to Forbes, unplanned downtime is, next to a health and safety or environmental incident, the single most costly thing which can happen to these kinds of businesses. 82% of companies have experienced some form of unplanned downtime in the past three years, with the vast majority having suffered multiple incidents in the same period.

"The average manufacturer confronts 800 hours of equipment downtime per year — more than 15 hours per week,” reports Forbes. "That downtime comes at a cost, and it isn’t cheap. For example, the average automotive manufacturer loses $22,000 per minute when the production line stops. That quickly adds up. Overall, unplanned downtime costs industrial manufacturers as much as $50 billion a year.”

Predictive Maintenance and Condition Monitoring

Without a doubt, the most effective way to avoid unplanned downtime in 2023 is by leveraging advanced technology such as IoT and data analytics to constantly monitor assets, become alerted when faults begin to develop, and build mathematical models which can predict the conditions under which faults are more or less likely to occur (check out our article on prescriptive maintenance for more information).

According to Deloitte, predicting failure via advanced analytics can increase asset uptime by as much as 20%. Not only that but leveraging these kinds of technologies in your industrial operations increases productivity across the board and reduces the cost of bringing your products to market – making your organization more competitive in an increasingly crowded market.

"Knowing well ahead of time when an asset will fail avoids unplanned downtimes and broken assets,” says Deloitte in a position paper on the topic. "On average, predictive maintenance increases productivity by 25%, reduces breakdowns by 70% and lowers maintenance costs by 25%. It is based on advanced analytics and marks a new way of organizing and implementing maintenance on an industrial scale.”

National Instruments

Throwing its own hat into this ring, National Instruments has, in 2022, announced the launch of a brand-new service for the predictive maintenance and condition monitoring of test equipment and test facilities. The Austin, Texas based producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software has dubbed this technology ActiveUptime and describes it as a unique Maintenance-as-a-Service solution.

National Instruments recognized that, while unplanned downtime can result in such massive losses in productivity and revenue as detailed above, a concerning number of manufacturers were still relying on manual spreadsheets and other outdated processes to monitor and manage their business-critical assets. ActiveUptime replaces these archaic practices with a plug and play solution which leverages proprietary hardware and software to collect valuable environmental and system data, and edge-based pre-processing to speed up data collection, aggregation, and movement.

National Instruments claims its ActiveUptime solution can almost eliminate the disruption caused by unplanned downtime with outcome-specific dashboards which display real-time and actionable data for both condition monitoring and predictive maintenance – automatically monitoring both ongoing system health and highlighting areas of concern.

Due to its plug and play configuration, ActiveUptime’s intelligent environmental sensor boards and optimized data processing, intuitive real-time dashboards, and predictive modelling, plus at team of maintenance experts at the ready to assist with any questions or teething problems, can be up and running in days rather than months.

"One of the key challenges faced by manufacturers is having visibility into physical systems to keep them running smoothly and avoiding any reputation-damaging product failures," said SVP & GM of National Instrument’s Portfolio Business Unit, Josh Mueller in a press release. "ActiveUptime provides the most accurate picture of these systems. With the assistance of our maintenance experts, our customers get to the root of the problem quickly, achieve fast resolution, and implement measures to prevent it from happening again.”

Final Thoughts

Fighting back against unplanned downtime is a concern for all brands which rely on assets in their day-to-day operations. Predictive maintenance and condition monitoring are two valuable tools to have available but can be difficult to implement. However, with a plug and play solution such as National Instruments’ ActiveUptime in the tool bag, companies in the space can install these practices quickly and easily.

"Predictive maintenance and condition monitoring are becoming key pillars in the broader digital transformation of manufacturing," Mueller concludes. "Real-time continuous monitoring maximizes total asset uptime, reduces the costly expense of spares and optimizes maintenance costs by moving from time-based to usage-based maintenance."