Global Field Services Delivers 80% Productivity Improvement

Industries: Cold-Chain, HVAC, Refrigeration, Industrial Equipment

Use Case: Field Services, Aftermarket

A large multi-national customer of Panasonic operates tens of thousands of refrigeration systems across their chain of supermarkets. Equipment failures and downtime lead to millions of losses annually. At the same time, field service teams are constrained by labor shortages and access to the right expertise when they need it.

By applying Aitomatic solutions, with the ability to scale domain expertise for service organizations, Panasonic was able to help this customer save millions in downtime costs while driving major productivity improvements for field services in the first 12 months.

Before Aitomatic, our field service solutions required more work than the value we got and our technicians were overwhelmed. With Aitomatic’s AI solution, we were able to scale our domain expertise and service operations.

Operating Costs
Saved

$25M

Time to Production

6 months

Field Operator Productivity

+80%

The Problem

Not enough experts to meet demand

The refrigeration supply chain (cold chain) is a $250B industry globally. Trucks pick up fresh produce. Sea vessels transport food across the ocean. Neighborhood grocery stores maintain ideal climate-controlled conditions until you make the purchase. It’s all about keeping things fresh. Because of that, failures in refrigeration and freezer equipment is costly in repairs, associated produce loss, and disruptions to the supply chain.

Panasonic is a global supplier of commercial cold-chain equipment including refrigeration systems. Panasonic and third party partners offer service contracts to maintain, repair, and upgrade equipment over its lifecycle.

One of the largest customers is a multi-national supermarket chain. With a large footprint of stores, equipment failures and downtime are a major issue.

On top of that, the field service organization face major challenges in finding and retaining skilled technicians to meet the demand. Panasonic wanted a solution to improve service productivity while empowering service technicians from all levels of expertise with faster, more accurate failure diagnosis.

The Solution

Scaling the domain expertise with AI

To overcome these challenges, Panasonic leveraged Aitomatic to automatically translate domain knowledge into an intelligent solution for field services.

Domain expertise is the lifeblood of Panasonic’s operations - knowledge of how refrigeration systems interact with the environment and the key variables internally and externally that may cause failures. For example, unusual vibrations may be caused by a number of issues but when combined with poor airflow and an observed leakage, it’s likely the compressor is failing.

To start, the Panasonic team identified their most experienced technicians and highest value documentation including equipment manuals, service reports, and operating procedures.

Like many industrial companies, domain knowledge is spread across multiple people, systems, and documents. One of the big challenges is making this high value yet distributed and messy information accessible to service teams.

With Aitomatic’s pre-built training pipelines, Panasonic could quickly iterate on the necessary data and knowledge inputs to get the best performance.

After a successful evaluation from the field service team, Panasonic integrated the solution into their maintenance management system making it easily accessible to the field technicians.

By turning valuable knowledge from experienced technicians, equipment documents, service records, and data into a Virtual AI solution, Panasonic is able to empower field service technicians with faster, more accurate diagnoses and repairs.