Laura Hyde |
Obeikan Investment Group (OIG), a Saudi packaging company, has successfully reduced the number of machinery breakdowns in its Rigid Plastics division after adopting ‘smart factory’ software platform O3ai, which was built on Microsoft Azure Service technologies.
Before implementing the AI-powered software on the firm’s 1,200 machines and 280 assembly lines, staff members across 20 factories would spend almost three hours a day analysing the previous 24 hours of data, which had been painstakingly collected by hand. Thanks to the O3ai platform, which was developed in-house, the data is now reviewed within minutes. The software enables staff to identify when a breakdown happened and why it happened, as well as providing actions on how to correct it.
The platform provides real-time data that means problems relating to quality, waste, efficiency and productivity can be spotted before they happen. A chatbot digests and interprets a constant stream of data produced by the production line machines, each of which has a system of sensors to feed data to O3ai.
OIG CEO Abdallah Al-Obeikan created the platform and says its implementation has resulted in a 30 per cent increase in overall efficiency and has been vital in taking the firm from a $750 million company to a $1 billion company in four years.
“Using AI to reduce your costs is not really a luxury to do; it’s critical to survive,” said Al-Obeikan in a blog post on the Microsoft website.
O3ai now operates as its own company and Tarik Taman, general manager, credits the platform’s success with OIG’s partnership with Microsoft.
“Because we partnered with Microsoft from day one, because we’ve used all of the infrastructure and service that Azure has to offer, we get to move at higher speed as compared to legacy software,” he said. “We really have had the good fortune to have something called last-mover advantage. We’re one of the first software platforms in our space where the first line of code was written in the 2020s, so we don’t have 10- and 20-year-old legacy code that we’re trying to rewrite the logic of constantly.”
O3ai is available to purchase in the Middle East and Europe. Following the move of its headquarters to the US in the coming months, the platform will also be available to purchase by US manufacturers.