Startups

Uptime AI | Get insights on how to attain operational excellence at your Industrial Plant?

• ByStartupStory     |    July 4, 2022

Jagadish Gattu, the founder and CEO of Uptime AI. He has 7 years of experience at GE managing predictive maintenance product lines and experience working with clients such as BP, Chevron, Dow Chemicals, SABIC, ROSNEFT. Prior to that, 8 years of experience at MathWorks in industrial data analytics delivering solutions to US air force, US Navy, NASA, Automotive, and energy companies. Has 7 patents, B.Tech (ME) from IIT-Madras, MS (ME) from Michigan State University, and MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Uptime AI is concerned with offering its clients a way through dealing with the pain points or challenges they face with the current solutions and know-how the industrial analytics space is evolving and how can one use it to achieve better profitability for industrial plants and operational excellence. 

Overview of the industrial size and Market dynamics 

According to Jagadish, Manufacturing in itself is a pretty much large sector and contributes to around 10-15% of the GDP depending on the country. When we compare the telecom and automotive sectors, they probably contribute 5-7%. Manufacturing is an old industry and like any other sector it also wants to improve its profitability but at the same time there are several headwinds like the machines are getting older many of them are decades old but still are in use. As well as the operations are getting more complex, the technology is also getting more involved with the addition of lots of data. 

The market is also facing changes in the demographics of the workforce like the people who joined the manufacturing sector in the 80s and 90s are retiring and a younger and less experienced population is joining to look for newer and more innovative solutions to continue to make the operations safer. 

Is the Indian market mature ?

Dynamics of the market are spread across the globe in terms of getting more complex data with obsolete machinery. And so a lot of industries are opting for new digital solutions. And the 

Indian market is not the first to get on to these digital solutions, since some the countries like North America have started on this journey earlier. But the Indian market on the other hand is catching up with a vengeance as a lot of industries across the board are putting emphasis on digitalisation. Apart from specific industries which have always been ahead of the curve now in India, industries like power, oil and gas, renewables, cement, FMCG, food and beverages are catching up. And in the next five to six years, India even inches further and might cross some other countries in the market for digital technologies in manufacturing.

Key driving factors for India’s growth 

The energy source, primarily the raw materials is transformed into the output ready for selling. Many times the inputs and the outputs are defined by the markets themselves like in refinery, the price of crude oil and gasoline or petrol or diesel is more or less defined by the market. But the process of transforming the outputs in a more efficient way is what contributes to the increase in profitability and so operations become the key factor. 

The elements that drive this improvement within operations are:-

• Machines should not fail unnecessarily
• The efficiency of the machines should be high i.e. it should be capable of producing higher output with the least amount of input

 Following these will automatically lower the maintenance cost and will enhance productivity with the decrease in product variability. And all of these contribute to higher margins in the business and these are the driving factors required for the need for digital solutions to identify and fix the issues faster. 

Unique solutions offered by Uptime AI 

It provides customers with the solutions or more specific answers to their problems rather than giving full data analysis tools. It provides solutions through its ‘AI Expert’, which essentially helps the operations team to solve either reliability problems or performance-related issues weeks in advance and four times faster to resolve them as well as with three times less effort across the scale. The company has high levels of automation in terms of data analytics and has a built-in system approach that helps in identifying the cause and the diagnosis along with built-in failure modes and recommendations for a lot of equipment so that it becomes easy for the engineers to find and fix the problems. 

Market evolution due to the pandemic 

Due to the pandemic, the data science and the expertise which translates the information in the data inputs into contextual information, both of these aspects have become much more highlighted. Since people in the industries had to operate remotely even for the heavy industries and so the industries had to rely on data which has altogether put more emphasis on operations. There have also been various leakages and explosions in the power plants across the globe and that also makes people realise the importance of how to prepare for such situations in the future.

 Future prospects of the company 

The company positions itself as the thought leader in the industrial manufacturing space. In the coming future, Uptime AI is going to be the catalyst that takes the manufacturing sector to the next level of productivity. Its vision is to provide a virtual advisor or AI advisor for every manufacturing plant with its solution to decentralise expertise and help operators solve either failure, reliability or performance-related issues faster with less effort. The company has so far customers across the board from various sectors like power, refining, renewables, wind, solar, and cement from geographics of North America to India. 

 

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