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Case study · Operations

Alarm at 2:14. Resolved by 2:31.

The production incident, end-to-end

The night shift does not have to wait for morning. An agent diagnoses the alarm on machine data, raises the ticket, reserves the part and wakes the right person on Teams — only when truly necessary.

350alarms a month across three shifts. 40% require action — and every minute of response time chips away at the production plan.

Executive summary

The challenge

Line alarms get lost between shifts; response depends on who is around and what they know.

What changes

The agent diagnoses on MES/CMMS data, launches the procedure and involves people only for decisions.

Business value

Shorter MTTR, less downtime, every failure with a complete history.

Systems & scope

MES, CMMS, spare-parts store, Teams; UiPath agents + robots, Maestro™ orchestration.

Illustrative scenario

A three-shift plant, 350 alarms a month

The 2:14 alarm lands on a panel nobody watches continuously. The operator finishes the round, comes back, classifies it. If it is beyond the shift, it waits for the morning briefing.

By morning it turns out the part should have been ordered overnight, and maintenance is the last to know. MTTR grows not because failures are hard — but because information logistics are.

The current reality

  1. SystemThe alarm appears in the MES
  2. WaitingWaits until someone notices it between tasks
  3. HumanThe operator classifies from experience
  4. HumanPhone calls: foreman, maintenance, parts store
  5. Error riskKnowledge of similar failures lives only in heads
  6. WaitingThe part is ordered only in the morning
  7. HumanThe failure report written after the fact — or never
HumanSystemWaitingError risk

The hidden cost of the current process

Downtime is only the top of the bill

  • 105 hours a month of human alarm triage — 60% of which is noise.
  • Every MTTR hour on a bottleneck line means an unrecovered plan and weekend overtime.
  • Failure history is scattered — the same problems return because nobody sees the pattern.

The cost of doing nothing

A year of manual alarm triage≈ 40 300 €
3 years of the same response model≈ 121 000 €
Downtime hours from slow responsethe main cost — line-dependent

Manual work is an operational tax: the automation investment is finite, the manual cost is paid again every month.

The process after automation

  1. AutomationThe agent reads the alarm and machine data in a second
  2. AutomationMatches against history: known cause, known procedure
  3. AutomationRaises the CMMS ticket and reserves the part
  4. HumanWakes the technician on Teams only for a real decision
  5. AutomationTracks SLA to closure and writes the failure report
HumanAutomation

What the automation handles

  • Round-the-clock triage of every alarm
  • Procedures: ticket, part, notifications, escalations
  • History and report of every failure — automatically

When a human decides

  • Line-stop decisions
  • Novel failures with no pattern in history
  • Priorities when resources conflict

Before

Alarm response (night)until morning
Manual triage / month~105 h
Part on siteafter the briefing
Failure reportsometimes

After

Alarm response (night)seconds
Manual triage / monthdecisions only
Part on siteordered overnight
Failure reportalways, automatic

Value model — example assumptions

Illustrative model
140 actionable alarms × 45 min= 105 h / mies.
105 h × €32 hourly cost= 3 360 € / mies.
12 months× 12
Annual capacity released (triage alone)≈ 40 300 €

Business benefits

  • MTTR in minutes where today it is hours
  • Night shifts with the same support as day shifts
  • Repeat failures caught as a pattern, not bad luck
  • Maintenance works on data, not phone calls

Board-level KPIs affected

MTTROEEUnplanned downtimeMaintenance backlog

What management gains

  • One live picture of failure rates across lines
  • Hard data for overhaul and capex decisions
  • Procedural discipline without disciplining people

Estimate it for your organisation

hours released per month
annual capacity released

An illustrative estimate based on your inputs. A model of released capacity — not a savings promise.

Systems in this scenario

Inputs

  • MES / SCADA
  • CMMS
  • Magazyn części

Mientha agentic layer

  • UiPath Agent Builder
  • UiPath robots
  • Maestro™ · Action Center

Core systems

  • CMMS
  • ERP (zamówienia części)
  • Teams

Human approval: Teams / Action Center

What we deliver

  • Analysis of alarm logs and failure history
  • A diagnosis agent with a known-cause base
  • Automated procedures: ticket, part, escalation
  • Teams notifications and decisions for the shifts
  • MES/CMMS/ERP integrations
  • A monthly failure report and pattern review

What we need to start

  • Alarm logs from 1–3 months
  • Response procedures (even if only in foremen's heads)
  • CMMS access and the critical-parts list
  • A shift foreman for 2 workshops

Implementation roadmap

Discovery

We map the process, data and exceptions with process owners.

Design

Target flow, business rules, approval thresholds.

Build

Agents, robots and integrations in your environment.

Validate

Tests on real cases, exception handling.

Go-live

Controlled rollout with human oversight.

Optimise

Monitoring, reporting and continuous improvement.

Typical duration depends on systems and rules — a single process is usually weeks, not quarters.

Risk and controls

Autonomy under control

  • The agent never controls machines — it works on information and procedure
  • Stops and safety decisions always belong to people
  • Every action logged: who, what, when, on what basis
  • OT-network access only via existing, approved interfaces

Why now

  • Night-shift staffing gaps will not disappear — the support model must
  • Every month is ~140 alarms handled slower than necessary
  • You already have the machine data — tonight nobody is reading it

Why this matters to:

COO

Less unplanned downtime and a predictable production plan.

Plant Director

The night shift stops being a blind spot.

Head of Maintenance

The team arrives with a diagnosis and the part — not to find one.

Questions we usually hear

“A plant is no place for AI experiments.”

We agree. That is why the agent never touches control systems — it organises the information and procedures around the machines. The OT layer stays untouched.

“Our foremen know better anyway.”

They do — and that is exactly the knowledge the agent captures. Instead of leaving with every retirement, procedures become plant assets.

“Every one of our lines is different.”

We start with one — the most expensive to stop. Its patterns and integrations halve the rollout time on the next lines.

When this may not be the right solution

  • Only a dozen alarms a month, all of them novel
  • No CMMS or failure history at all — foundation first
  • Machine data unavailable outside the control room

A question for your next board meeting

Which of last quarter's failures would have ended differently if the response had started one second after the alarm?

What does one hour of downtime on your key line cost?

One month of alarm logs is enough — we will show which of them the agent would close without people.

Let us talk about your plant

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