Root cause analysis application boosts AI-enhanced reliability for the chemical, oil & gas, and process manufacturing industries

Uptake announced today that it has signed a partnership agreement with Reliability Center, Inc. (RCI) to advance equipment and plant reliability for the process and asset-intensive industries, including chemical, oil & gas, pulp & paper, and power. The strategic partnership joins RCI’s root cause analysis investigation methodology of equipment defects through its application EasyRCA with Uptake’s Industrial AI and extensive Asset Strategy Library of 800 asset types and 58,000+ failure modes to generate cost-optimized maintenance strategies for process companies that mitigate risk, enhance safety, assure productivity, and increase plant profitability.

“Uptake’s AI predicts what will go wrong before significant loss occurs. This helps our clients focus on the highest value pieces of equipment and systems to apply our best-of-breed root cause analysis methodology and software before chaos even strikes” shared Sebastian Traeger, Chairman and Managing Director of RCI. “Uptake realizes the transformative potential of Industrial AI by making it simpler and more reliable to operate and maintain process plants and to do so with more buy-in from across operations.”

The combined offerings of RCI and Uptake enable process companies to pinpoint primary reasons for declines in a production line’s quality or the decrease in the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) of an asset. Specifically, RCI’s EasyRCA tool allows maintenance and reliability practitioners in process industries to formally conduct root cause analysis and identify factors that cause failures, defects, or quality deviations in a manufactured product. As plants address complicated root causes and identify productivity losses in these process systems, Uptake and RCI help empower reliability teams to avoid downtime costs and increase profitability.

“The process and asset-intensive manufacturers have long used root cause analysis to build out their reliability programs. The renewed emphasis on Operational Excellence and Sustainability due to the COVID-19 crisis has only reinforced that need,” shared Joe Perino, Research Analyst at LNS Research. “The new partnership between RCI and Uptake provides Uptake’s customers in fleet, rail, equipment, mining and wind energy new RCA capabilities, while at the same time introducing Uptake’s Industrial AI to RCI’s 500+ strong process and asset-intensive industries client base.”

“In a digital plant environment with complex asset hierarchies, plant operators need shared visibility over plant productivity. With Industrial AI, enterprises gain the same foresight into machines where the unaided reliability engineer is unable,” said Drew Soignier, Vice President of Product Development at Uptake. “Uptake’s partnership with RCI will streamline the expertise of reliability teams through the Asset Strategy Library.”

Uptake’s Asset Strategy Library (ASL) is the world’s most comprehensive knowledge base of failure information, generating maintenance strategies for specific equipment failure modes. The ASL, in turn, powers the maintenance strategy engine, Uptake Compass, which enables users to optimize maintenance spend and eliminate low-value tasks. Through the ingestion of work-order and sensor data, Uptake Compass delivers asset-specific, component-level reliability analysis including part survival curves, mean-time between failures, risk scenarios, and bad actors. All translated into financial impact, key performance metrics in Uptake Compass provide a single source of industrial information to track, manage, and improve plant performance.

Uptake’s partnership with RCI comes as Crain’s Chicago Business recently named Uptake as #2 on its Most Innovative Companies 2020 list. The company also recently announced the deployment of its software by United Road and BHE Renewables and MidAmerican Energy Company.

About Uptake

Uptake is the intelligence system for industrial assets. Providing an AI-driven asset management solution that bridges the gap between industrial assets and front-line workers, Uptake gives all departments—including maintenance, operations, finance, and sales—a single, shared view of every asset in an operation. With the power of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), Uptake helps customers monitor and increase the availability of assets, improve asset reliability, and streamline operations. Recognized for leadership in industrial IoT (IIoT) by the World Economic Forum, CNBC, and Forbes, Uptake is headquartered in Chicago with a presence in Canada, South America, India, Europe, and Australia. To stay up-to-date on what we’re doing, visit us at www.uptake.com and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Reliability Center, Inc.

Reliability Center, Inc. was established in 1972 as a Research & Development arm of a major U.S. corporation. In 1985, RCI became an independent corporation under the direction of founder, Charles J. Latino, whose goal was to spread the reliability message to companies all over the world. The company provides training programs to clients using their PROACT® methodology; consulting for organizations to develop a reliability culture; facilitation and mentoring for specific RCAs; as well as EasyRCA software. For more information, visit www.reliability.com or contact RCI at 800-457-0645 or info@reliability.com.