TCS Equipment Intelligence

Overview 

In response to the digital disruption in the industry, manufacturers are connecting to their products in the field but are unable to obtain significant insights and gains from the data in these intelligent products.

Responding to changing customer preferences, they need to shift from traditional service models to new business models with service level agreements (SLAs) on value delivered. This not only increases customer satisfaction and stickiness but also helps organizations realize transformational growth in service revenue. The new business models come with several risks, ranging from the customer’s operational patterns to product reliability in adverse environmental conditions, which impact the profitability of service contracts.  

TCS Equipment Intelligence from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) can help manufacturers address the risks of the new business models by building wallet share and partnerships in their customers’ business through performance contracts and increased connectivity to their installed base. The solution also helps manufacturers derive value from intelligently connected assets by providing them actionable insights.  

All these aspects of TCS Equipment Intelligence are core to Neural Manufacturing™, which enables an organization and its ecosystems to become connected, cognitive, and collaborative. 

Business context

Over the years, leading manufacturing enterprises and asset-intensive businesses have amped up their digital quotient with increasing deployment of software-embedded products, operations, and assets.

However, deriving value from intelligently connected assets means creating and designing a services portfolio that improves the reliability, availability, and profitability of the assets and monetizes the asset data to develop new revenue streams.  

TCS Equipment Intelligence (see figure 1), an IoT-based solution, helps manufacturers build intelligence around equipment operations. It supports several personas, including service managers, field managers, and reliability engineers who run servitization programs and improve contract profitability, equipment reliability, and installed base availability.  

Encompassing the entire contract management cycle, TCS Equipment Intelligence enables real-time condition monitoring, predictive health score computation, service order planning, and monthly invoicing based on the contracted SLAs. With platform-agnostic features, the solution can be configured – from the edge to the mobile app – for rapid deployment in just six weeks. Powered by TCS’ machine learning models for health score computation and profitability simulation, it accelerates predictive maintenance of the installed base and mitigates risks associated with contracts by identifying them early on. The result: Higher profit margins and improved customer experience. 

Solution

Below are the key features of TCS Equipment Intelligence:

• Real-time asset health monitoring: Real-time predictive alarms based on health scores of assets using deep learning techniques.   
• Deployment-ready health score: Custom health score models for a burgeoning list of products.  
• Profitability simulation: Calculating the winning price for new contracts and monitoring potential risks for existing contracts.
• Improved asset management: Detailed map view of installed base and hierarchical view of subsystems for effectively managing assets.  
• Analytical model support: Analytics workbench for product engineers supports self-service analytical models.
• Simplified service order planning: Integration with asset management systems for planning and execution.
• Billing transparency: Integration with customer relationship management platforms, enabling usage-, outcome-, and efficiency-based billing.      
• Role support: Persona-based dashboard and analytics for key roles such as field manager, reliability engineer, and technicians. 

Business benefits

TCS Equipment Intelligence provides manufacturers with the following benefits:

• Improved connectivity to the installed base
• Enhanced predictive maintenance 
• Higher service revenue with performance contracts
• Reduced cost to serve 
• Increased profitability 
• Ability to win more contracts using optimal pricing 

The TCS advantage

Manufacturers stand to gain when they partner with TCS:

• TCS Neural Manufacturing solution suite: Intelligent, cognitive, adaptive, resilient, automated, and personalized capabilities woven together into an information fabric to help customers transform their business. 
• Innovation excellence in IoT: TCS has 20 global labs for IoT solutions and rapid translation of ideas to value, encompassing artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced analytics, and cybersecurity-led solutions, accelerating the realization of business value for customers. 
• Deep domain expertise: Offering customers value with deep contextual knowledge and experience across manufacturing, including the aerospace, automotive, process, and industrial segments. 
• Easy, scalable, and flexible deployment: TCS Connected Universe Platform can be easily deployed on the cloud, on a manufacturer’s premises or in their assets, based on their preference and infrastructure availability. 
• System integration services: TCS has extensive expertise and experience delivering complex IoT projects and working with several platforms to seamlessly integrate solutions with customers’ back-end systems.