Founder background
Work from Dr. Abdo's time at HP. He did this as an employee of HP, so it is part of his background, not Analytica past performance.
Predicting equipment failure before it stops the site
Unscheduled downtime is the most expensive thing that happens on a mine site. The operator wanted to stop reacting to failures and start scheduling around them.
- Client
- A mining and heavy-equipment operator
- Sector
- Mining · Industrial
- Role
- Dr. Abdo, as an employee of HP
- Period
- Not disclosed
- Result
- −23% unscheduled downtime, client-reported
- unscheduled downtime, client-reported
- −23%unscheduled downtime, client-reported
- maintenance cost, client-reported
- −12%maintenance cost, client-reported
The problem
Heavy equipment fails, and when it fails unexpectedly the cost isn't the part — it's the shift that stops. The operator was maintaining reactively and wanted to know which components were approaching failure while there was still time to schedule around them.
What was done
Two complementary approaches. On components with enough historical failure data, the team modeled remaining useful life directly — how much service life is left in this specific part, given how it has been used.
On components without that history, supervised learning has nothing to learn from. So the team used unsupervised methods to estimate stress levels from operating data instead, which flags parts behaving unlike their peers without needing to have seen them fail.
The result
The operator reported unscheduled downtime falling by more than 23%, and maintenance costs by more than 12%, once preventive scheduling was in place.
The second-order effect the operator valued more: work could be planned. Knowing a component has weeks rather than days left is what lets a maintenance team order parts and book a window instead of scrambling.
Capability
Predictive maintenance, remaining useful life modeling
Related work
Further reading
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