29 Kiloton Forge

Aerospace
Anomaly Detection|Root Cause Analysis

Client

US’s largest aerospace manufacturer operates 150 factories producing raw materials through finished parts

Problem

Client operates a 29 kiloton forge 24/7 producing failsafe parts for jet engines (~200 SKUs, some ITAR). Parts undergo mandatory FAA quality scans, which take 24 to 48 hours to complete. Lag time for quality reports results in scrapping a day’s worth of production several times per year, in addition to frequent downtime due to difficult to diagnose causes.

Solution

Metallurgist-turned-data scientist used OMAHA to integrate on-premises ERP & MES, air gapped historian and cloud enterprise data lake. OMAHA’s rich programming environment was leveraged to perform sophisticated anomaly detection and root cause analysis every 90 seconds.

Outcome

Higher precision alerts than MES (fewer false positives) via dynamic thresholds and statistical process control. Ranked possible root causes with recommended remediations. Rare root causes can be identified even across different SKUs. Easy to understand HMI for pulpit operators and rich diagnostic and exploratory dashboards for engineers.