AI for Manufacturing That Knows Your Machines
A troubleshooting and support tool that answers from your own schematics, PLC programs, manuals, and ticket history, specific to the machine in front of the tech.
The problem it solves
The answer to most machine problems already exists somewhere. It's in a schematic, a rung comment, a vendor manual, or a ticket someone closed three years ago. The tech standing at the machine at 2 AM just can't find it fast enough.
Machine builders feel this the most. Hundreds of machines in the field, built across years of revisions, and the same questions coming back to the support line from different customers.
Built for a machine builder with hundreds of machines in the field
We built this tool for an OEM with a large installed base. It works from the documents already on their servers and keeps every answer tied to the specific machine.
- Ticket lookup while you type. As a tech fills out a ticket, similar past tickets and how they were resolved come up alongside it.
- Machine-specific documents from the BOM. Look up a machine by serial or work order and get that unit's schematics, PLC program, manuals, and SOPs, driven by its bill of materials.
- Fault tracing across the PLC and the drawings. Follow a PLC output to its wire number and on to the field device and part number on the schematic.
- Plain-language questions about the logic. Ask why an output won't turn on and get the rungs and permissives involved, with the conditions that are blocking it.
- Clean data from old tickets. AI pulls structured data out of years of free-text tickets and service reports, and a person approves each extraction before it's saved.
The hard part was never retrieval
Most of the source material is binary: DWG schematics, PLC programs, HMI runtimes. It isn't text, it isn't searchable, and it's meaningless to a language model until someone converts and indexes it. So that's what we built. Binaries in, readable structured files out, prepped so the AI pulls what it needs when it needs it.
The part that took the time is context. Two machines throw the same fault, and the ticket from one helps the other. But the I/O is different, the program is a few revisions apart, and the cabinet might sit on another station. Give an AI the wrong machine's wiring and it answers confidently and wrong.
So similar tickets surface across the fleet, while the wiring, I/O, and program stay specific to the machine in front of you.
How we build these tools
- Answers cite their source, so a tech can open the drawing or rung and check it.
- People approve what AI extracts before it becomes part of the record.
- Your data stays on your infrastructure, on your servers or in a private cloud.
- It's tested against real tickets, judged by one question: would this have gotten the tech to the fix faster?
One honest limit: the tool only knows what's been documented. If a machine was wired differently than its drawings, the drawings are what it sees. That's a good reason to keep as-builts current, and it's usually the first thing a pilot turns up.
Who it's for
- Machine builders supporting a fleet of machines in the field. See controls engineering for OEMs.
- Plants with a small maintenance team and a lot of different OEM equipment.
- Teams that already have the documents, but not in one place anyone can search.
Related services
- PLC programming and controls engineering
- MES integration, OEE and data collection
- HMI and SCADA systems
Frequently asked questions
Does our data leave our network?
It doesn't have to. The tool can run on your own servers or in a private cloud, and it reads the documents where they already live.
What sources can it use?
Electrical schematics (AutoCAD DWG and DXF), Rockwell PLC programs, HMI projects, vendor manuals and PDFs, SOPs, and your historical support tickets and service reports.
Does it change anything on the machines?
No. The support tool reads documents and programs to answer questions. It doesn't write to controllers.
What happens when documentation is missing?
It says so. If a machine's drawings were never ingested, the tool reports that the data isn't available instead of guessing from a different machine.
Where do we start?
With a pilot on a handful of machines that have complete drawings and programs, and a set of real historical tickets to test it against.