✦ AI Use Case

AI-Powered Production & OEE Dashboard
Real-Time Manufacturing Intelligence

How a multi-site manufacturer gained real-time OEE visibility and AI-powered anomaly detection — catching equipment issues hours before they caused unplanned downtime.

🏚 Industry: Manufacturing
🛠 Tools: Power BI, Azure IoT Hub, Azure ML, SQL Server
Impact: 35% reduction in unplanned downtime

Business Problem

Scenario: Blind Spots Across the Production Floor

Plant managers had no real-time visibility into machine downtime or Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) across multiple production lines. Weekly Excel reports were outdated by the time they were reviewed, and unplanned downtime was costing the business significantly — with issues only discovered after the damage was already done.

AI-Powered Approach

Step 1 — Connected IoT Data to Power BI

Streamed real-time machine sensor data from Azure IoT Hub through Azure Data Factory into SQL Server, making it available as a live Power BI dataset with sub-minute refresh latency across all production lines.

Step 2 — Built OEE Semantic Model
OEE Score =
[Availability Rate] * [Performance Rate] * [Quality Rate]

Availability Rate =
DIVIDE(
    [Run Time],
    [Planned Production Time],
    0
)

Performance Rate =
DIVIDE(
    [Ideal Cycle Time] * [Total Count],
    [Run Time],
    0
)

A DAX-based semantic model calculating Availability, Performance, and Quality scores per machine, shift, and production line — with full time-intelligence measures for shift-over-shift and week-over-week comparisons.

Step 3 — AI Anomaly Detection & Predictive Maintenance

Applied Power BI's built-in Anomaly Detection visual to time-series OEE data, automatically flagging deviations with Copilot-generated explanations. An Azure Machine Learning model scored each machine's failure probability daily, surfaced as a risk indicator directly within the dashboard.

Proactive Alerting: Power BI data alerts and Power Automate flows notify maintenance teams via Microsoft Teams the moment OEE drops below threshold — shifting the team from reactive repairs to proactive interventions.

Measured Outcomes

35%
Reduction in unplanned downtime
4 hrs
Earlier anomaly detection vs. manual review
Real-Time
OEE visibility across all production lines
Zero
Manual report compilation required