Sight Machine and Azure empower manufacturers to increase production performance through industrial data, generative AI

Through a data-first approach, Sight Machine on Microsoft Azure creates a common data foundation by capturing and contextualizing data from the entire factory to deliver a systemwide view of the end-to-end manufacturing process. And now, Sight Machine’s Factory CoPilot further democratizes industrial data with generative AI, making plant data, analytics, and insights even more accessible and impactful for everyone—from shop floor operators to executives.

With these advanced, data-driven capabilities, customers like Intertape Polymer Group (IPG), a recognized digital manufacturing leader, are accelerating their transformation journeys.

A data foundation for scalable results

Sight Machine works with manufacturers like IPG to make their businesses stronger, more sustainable, and more resilient. From the start, Sight Machine probed to understand and assess the obstacles IPG faced when working with industrial data to solve production’s greatest challenges. One primary challenge faced was the limited adoption of data utilization throughout the company. While available to all, primarily engineers and managers used the data, thereby limiting the potential impact and scale of data-driven decision making.

Achieving full data utilization requires evaluating data in real time on the shop floor, not just analyzing historical data. To achieve this, data must be easy for anyone to interpret, digest, and use to ultimately make the right decisions.

With these challenges, Sight Machine and IPG set out to:

• Create a data-first platform to contextualize and house all plant data.
• Make the data accessible to everyone, from users on the shop floor to executives.

For years, Sight Machine has used Azure to optimize the impact of its MDP offering, along with Microsoft’s leading-edge cloud, data, and security offerings and commitment to customer success in digitally transforming the manufacturing sector. Sight Machine on Azure has helped IPG build a scalable data foundation for data-driven operations and continuous innovation with new capabilities like Factory CoPilot.

“We knew we had to do something more, something new, something novel to push the plant forward and be competitive. Sight Machine was open and transparent, and it had the right human element. It also had the right technology solutions for our problems. The way that it displayed the data was very effective in connecting with our people and simplifying and really making the data available to everyone,” says Bill Bourgeous, Plant Manager for the Tremonton, Utah, IPG facility.

Good AI begins with good data

By contextualizing all manufacturing data and making it more accessible across all stakeholders, from executives to the shop floor, manufacturers are equipped with more actionable insights to unlock and scale new levels of productivity across the enterprise. To better support manufacturers’ data accessibility needs, Sight Machine used Azure OpenAI Service to harness generative AI (GPT-4) and to develop Factory CoPilot.

Built on Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform, Factory CoPilot is a natural language interface that provides an always-on, intuitive user experience to help solve manufacturing’s greatest challenges, such as minimizing downtime and improving quality. This chat interface makes it easier for people who aren’t data experts to interact with the tools and understand the results. Now, IPG’s plant data, analytics, and insights are even more accessible and impactful for everyone.

Behind the scenes, Sight Machine’s machine learning tools seamlessly and rapidly perform all the calculations for which its platform has been optimized. This ensures that the results are based on auditable, traceable, and validated statistical models.

“Factory CoPilot is a way to break down some of the barriers that have existed in the past between users and data accessibility. And so, this is really targeted at folks who might have been intimidated by traditional data systems but are perfectly comfortable asking expert user questions which could be solved using the data now rather than having to have lots of expert users running around the plant floor,” says Kurt DeMaagd, Cofounder and Chief AI Officer at Sight Machine. “We have our own open API–based chat client where any person can go into this chat client, type a question using a normal sort of English phrasing of a problem, and it will give them back a reply in a human-readable format. And so, this really breaks down the barriers to being able to use and work with data in the manufacturing environment.”

Using generative AI to unlock new experiences and fuel data-driven operations

Factory CoPilot instantly answers the varying types of stakeholder queries from data that’s unique to each machine, line, or plant. Process engineers, operators, and management alike can use the chat interface in a way that doesn’t require deep statistical expertise to view results.

Initial observations from IPG’s use of Factory CoPilot highlight opportunities to:

• Decrease MDP onboarding time by up to 50 percent.
• Increase weekly average MDP usage by 25 percent.
• Extend and enhance the overall customer experience (shop floor operators) and reduce user friction through the intuitive chat interface.
• Automatically generate reports, such as morning meeting reports.
• Summarize daily and weekly trend data.

“Sight Machine’s technology can bring rapid value and scale across the manufacturing network of all the manufacturers that we get an opportunity to work with,” says Sudhir Arni, Senior Vice President of Business Outcomes at Sight Machine. “Sight Machine does that by providing access to its Manufacturing Data Platform that enables real-time, data-driven decision making and operations for all of these manufacturers, which is what will take them to the next level of continuous improvement across their manufacturing network. Once that data is truly usable using Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform, there are a number of different use cases and problems that the manufacturers can solve and truly start extracting value.”

A continuous, customer-driven innovation journey

Factory CoPilot will become increasingly core to Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform, delivering enhanced customer experiences that further underpin data-driven operations.

“Our partnership with Sight Machine and Microsoft is ever evolving and continues to become more important to our daily operations within the plant, helping us make quicker decisions on real-time data that’s analyzed in real time. This enables our frontline leaders right down to the production floor to be able to make the right decision quickly,” says Bourgeous.

As customer needs evolve, Sight Machine and Microsoft will continue to innovate with industrial data and AI-driven solutions to help customers build more intelligent factories and value chains.