Case study: AI-powered maintenance cuts downtime and costs for Fiberon’s manufacturing operations
Key takeaways
- AI-powered predictive maintenance helps prevent costly downtime and extends asset life for industrial operations.
- Fiberon’s pilot saved $274K and avoided 178 hours of downtime, proving the ROI of AI in manufacturing.
- Scalable digital strategies like Augury’s enable enterprise-wide transformation in under 12 months.
At Fortune Brands Innovations, a global company whose driving purpose is to “elevate every life by transforming spaces into havens,” there is no room for error on its factory floors. Increasing uptime and capacity, extending equipment lifecycles, and reducing the cost of asset care are vital for its portfolio of brands within the home, security, and commercial building markets.
With these goals in mind, the company chose to improve its predictive maintenance processes with a bold digital transformation strategy and an industrial-grade IoT and AI platform. A successful pilot with quick time to value at its New London, NC, Fiberon site led to a decision to scale the solution enterprise-wide, across 1,000+ machines internationally.
Piloting AI for predictive maintenance: Results from the frontline
AI can be game changing for efforts to improve the predictability of critical assets and infrastructure. AI-driven predictive maintenance is designed to detect and alert users to signs of asset degradation earlier and more reliably than conventional methods, and to provide critical insights on how to fix the asset in order to optimally plan and schedule corrective actions. Improving the ability to prevent failures and costly unplanned downtime gives manufacturers a competitive advantage.
Fortune Brands Innovations built its AI strategy in partnership with Augury, a provider of AI solutions for reliability and process optimization. Its full-stack Machine Health solution uses sensors that capture vibration, temperature, and magnetic data from machines; advanced AI diagnostics; and human reliability experts to improve the health and performance of industrial assets.
The platform’s AI algorithms are trained by industry experts and what Augury calls the “world’s largest data library,” including 500M+ hours of anonymized machine data recordings.
Fiberon, a manufacturer of wood-alternative decking and railing products, conducted the pilot of the new technology at its New London plant over an eight-month period beginning in December 2023. Forty machines were connected to the AI-powered Machine Health solution for monitoring.
Early on, a single machine event on an extrusion line led to $56,000 in estimated cost savings and avoiding 16 hours of downtime, including four hours of repair time and 12 hours of waiting for the system to heat back up to the required temperatures for production. Specifically, the Augury team identified a risk in the L20 Melt Pump in March 2024, and issued an alarm for the gearbox indicating potential looseness and bearing wear at the gearbox and motor components. The New London site team responded with an inspection to confirm audibles coming from the asset and then planned a repair for May 1, 2024, preventing what could have been a catastrophic melt pump failure.
Fiberon L20 Melt Pump Save Results:
- $56,000 in estimated cost savings
- 16 hours of avoided downtime
“In this particular situation, the motor and gearbox needed to be replaced. We knew we had a shutdown coming up, so we were able to plan the motor, the gearbox, the alignment, the startup—everything during a shutdown. Now that process took 10 to 12 hours, but we had zero downtime on the line because the plant was already shut,” explains Ric Wojcik, Senior Manufacturing Engineering Manager at Fiberon. “Had it failed in the middle of the night or on a weekend, we wouldn’t have been able to respond so fast.”
Over the course of the pilot, the site avoided $274,000 in costs and 178 downtime hours and achieved a 2.5x return on investment (ROI). Trust in the AI was indicated by the Fiberon plant team’s 96% average response rate to Augury alerts. Six active users collaborated as a team throughout the pilot, including the Maintenance Manager, Maintenance Planner, Maintenance Technician, Plant Manager, Engineering Manager, and Director of Manufacturing Intelligence Systems.
Fiberon, New London’s 2024 Results:
- $274,000 in estimated cost savings
- 178 hours of avoided downtime
- 2.5x ROI in 8 months
- 96% average response rate to Augury alerts
The pilot’s success led Fortune Brands Innovations to leverage Augury’s Fast Track methodology for a 12-month enterprise-wide rollout beginning in October 2024. At the halfway point, Augury’s Machine Health solution was already deployed on two-thirds of the 1,000 machines targeted across 16 sites in the U.S., UK, and Mexico.
