It’s a fact: few manufacturers are able to fully exploit the potential of the information available on the shop floor. When it comes to solving real-world problems, however, it is common for similar situations to have already been encountered in the past on other sites in the same group. With Similar Tickets, Fabriq offers manufacturers the opportunity to capitalize on their operational knowledge and thus increase productivity. We met Octave Lapeyronie, co-founder of Fabriq.
Fabriq is a recognized leader in the digitalization of Lean Manufacturing in factories.
The Fabriq application enables production sites to achieve their daily performance objectives, carry out continuous improvement actions and aim for operational excellence on a large scale.
Similar Tickets is an innovative feature, designed to simplify problem solving in industrial environments.
Engineer Techniques: Can you introduce the Fabriq application?
Octave Lapeyronie : Initially, Fabriq is a tool that replaces the whiteboards used in continuous improvement rituals in factories (monitoring performance indicators, field audits, etc.).
In industry, different teams are required to work together on a daily basis: maintenance, production, quality, R&D. However, this need for collaboration goes beyond the framework of being present at a given moment. We therefore created Fabriq to enable these teams to collaborate seamlessly, based on a single source of information.
Fabriq helps manufacturers in all manufacturing sectors to digitalize their continuous improvement processes. The digitalization of these rituals allows teams to gain operational excellence. We are present in more than 400 production sites and more than 30 countries.
Is operational excellence of teams a new topic?
Operational excellence has always been a major issue for manufacturers and the context of recent years (Covid, supply difficulties, rising energy prices) has only accentuated this observation.
In recent decades, innovation has focused mainly on machine productivity, through automation. However, while there are still things to be implemented, it is urgent to focus on areas that have been somewhat neglected, particularly the productivity of people and their collaboration. Indeed, in this area, technological tools have not changed for 40 years! However, we know that the human factor will remain an essential point of operational excellence for a long time to come.
What is Similar Tickets, your new AI-powered tool, used for?
At Fabriq, we are convinced that artificial intelligence is a perfect ingredient to improve collaboration between teams. In particular, there is enormous potential in the capitalization and standardization of information. How can we ensure that new information collected at a specific time and location by a maintenance team becomes accessible to all the teams in the group, whenever they want?
Of course, this is impossible with whiteboards and paper-based processes, which are still the norm in many companies. Similar Tickets was created to prevent teams from continually solving the same problems and constantly reinventing the wheel.
How does this tool work?
Similar Tickets retrieves the content of tickets generated by teams and which contain the description of the problems, the actions that were taken and the solutions found. The information from these tickets is then transformed into a vector containing the semantic meaning of the text, using a LLM (Large Language Models) learning model, all this independently of the language!
We then compare these tickets with each other, which allows us to make connections. In concrete terms, when an operator encounters a problem and creates a ticket, they are immediately alerted to the existence of tickets whose meaning is semantically close, above a set threshold. The person is then encouraged to consult these other tickets and contact the person who has already encountered the problem.
Even if two problems are rarely identical, the different sites of industrial groups often have many points in common: suppliers, machines, software, etc. With Similar Tickets we are betting that a large number of previously unexploited gateways exist between these entities.
Do you plan to add more AI features to Fabriq?
Absolutely! The Fabriq tool is constantly evolving and we plan to integrate a knowledge function that will allow us to host permanent documentation. The idea is to make this information immediately accessible to field users, through a conversational AI, based on the ChatGPT model.
Because most of the time, the know-how exists, but it is diffuse. Too often, when a person in the field needs information, they waste an infinite amount of time exchanging messages, searching through archives, doing their own research. During this time, the problems are not resolved, which can impact production.
Anything that can promote autonomy in the field must therefore be developed. This is also one of the pillars of Lean Management.
Can AI also be used to create content from field information?
For companies, it is vital not to lose the knowledge acquired on a daily basis, but it is also difficult, in a production context, to dedicate time to documenting this knowledge. AI assistance in writing reports, based on ticket information, is therefore totally conceivable. It is not impossible that this will become one of the next features of Fabriq.
What feedback do you get from your customers?
This is an observation we made while working with our industrial clients: before Fabriq, a large part of the time spent in meetings by employees was devoted to research or verification of factual information. In the end, little time was devoted to critical reasoning.
Customers who have implemented Fabriq can now focus on solving real problems, synchronously, eliminating live administration, which is exhausting for teams and does not add value.
