Dive Brief:
- MaintainX launched an AI maintenance building solution last week that it says will help those without traditional business intelligence and query building skills to draw insights from asset and maintenance data.
- Report Builder AI enables users to ask questions about labor, inventory, asset performance, downtime and compliance to generate visual reports within the MaintainX platform, the company said in a release Friday. The reports are generated from data on work orders, parts usage, purchase orders, maintenance schedules and asset history.
- “Today, all the knowledge lies in manuals, PDFs and people’s brains,” Sami Tas, MaintainX vice president of engineering and AI, said in an interview. “As those people retire, that information will be largely lost, unfortunately. Our goal is [to] capture that institutional knowledge [so] people can diagnose and fix issues faster and plan their operations better.”
Dive Insight:
Reducing unplanned downtime and improving asset tracking are the main goals for MaintainX, Tas said.
“You might have hundreds or thousands of assets, and you might need to actually look at the patterns and asset types,” Tas said. “With the report builder, Report Builder AI, you could type, ‘What are the asset types that gave me the most reliability issues?’ Or most downtime over the past six months? and Report Builder AI could build that report for you.”
These reporting capabilities are intended to address growing customer demand for advanced, in-platform reporting as organizations standardize maintenance and operational practices, according to the company.
“How much money [have] I spent on different parts [or] different vendors over time?” Tas said. “Which assets give me the most trouble?”
Facilities managers and maintenance teams could generate reports based on failure types and use a root analysis module to classify them and analyze which types of failure result in the most downtime, he said.
The data can also help teams improve labor use, according to Tas. “We know that 60% of the time is spent on researching and diagnosing the issues, and only 40% of the time is spent with the wrench,” he said. “So, how can we reduce the time spent on research and get you access to the information as fast as possible so that you can actually do more … work?”
Looking ahead, Tas said, the company is working to move AI tools from straightforward point solutions, designed to solve single problems, to more holistic uses that can help provide actionable insights and assist technicians’ judgment.
“Anybody can generate these reports,” Tas said. “Even for complex reports, [Report Builder AI] actually provides a starting point…. Editing [a query] is much easier than starting from scratch.”
