NI Develops ActiveUptime™ Maintenance Services (MaaS)

NI is returning to its offline Global User Conference after two years with the announcement of ActiveUptime, a Maintenance-as-a-Service (MaaS) solution for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance of test equipment and test facilities. It is a turnkey solution, customized for user environments, that provides the information needed to proactively monitor the operational health of systems and prevent critical test equipment from failing. As part of the ongoing service, dedicated technicians from the NI Maintenance team remotely monitor system operation, provide technical support, and tailor the solution to the customer's needs. The program improves the user's ability to proactively anticipate equipment operational outages before they occur.

Equipment failures account for 42 percent of the cost of unplanned downtime, which is estimated to cost manufacturers worldwide $50 billion annually. However, 52 percent of manufacturers report using spreadsheets to monitor and manage equipment. ni's ActiveUptime provides ready-to-use services, including the hardware and software needed to collect valuable environmental and system data, as well as edge-based preprocessing to accelerate data collection, aggregation, and transmission. Dashboards with specific results for condition monitoring and predictive maintenance will visualize real-time monitoring of system operations and identify critical areas needing attention, eliminating disruptions caused by unexpected equipment failures.

“One of the main challenges manufacturers face is understanding the physical system to keep it running smoothly and avoiding any reputationally damaging product failures,” said Josh Mueller, senior vice president and general manager, NI Portfolio Division. “ActiveUptime provides the most accurate view of these systems. With the assistance of NI's maintenance experts, our customers can quickly get to the root cause of a problem, fix it quickly, and take steps to prevent it from happening again.”

ActiveUptime provides the monitoring tools maintenance teams need - from intelligent environmental sensor boards and optimized data processing, to intuitive real-time dashboards and predictive modeling, and on-call maintenance specialists. The complete service can be up and running in days rather than months, turning testing into a strategic asset.

“Predictive maintenance and condition monitoring is becoming a key pillar of digital transformation in the broader manufacturing industry,” explains Mueller. ”By moving from time-based maintenance to usage-based maintenance, real-time continuous monitoring can maximize total asset uptime, reduce costly spare parts and optimize maintenance costs.”