Mahindra & Mahindra: Riding the AI/ML wave to lead in the Industry 4.0 era

Mahindra & Mahindra is a diversified conglomerate with presence in over 100 countries and has a track record of innovation in every sector that it plays in. It also happens to be one of India’s most recognized and respected brands.

As an automotive manufacturer they where constantly faced with the question: Can we replace physical testing of engines with virtual testing using AI/ML by integrating data from various sources?

All Mahindra engines used to go through multiple levels of testing before being certified to be sent to customers and there were no systems or processes to scientifically reduce the amount of testing done to validate engines. Also, all data was staged in multiple standalone servers that were accessed by various teams. Needless to add, that this resulted in increased costs and reduced throughput.

M&M engineers along with SAP embarked upon a unique project that replaced physical testing of their automotive engines with virtual testing using AI/ML algorithms built on SAP HANA and SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service along with integration to data from various field sources.

The first change that was made was to integrate all the data on a single platform using HANA and SAP Leonardo IoT services. This helped the team look at all the contributing data in a single place. Second, AI and ML models were applied to this data to predict the testing needed to be formed on any given engines so that number of tests done were reduce and only the relevant tests were done for an engine.

While SAP HANA created a new compute layer on which Industry 4.0 applications can be built, the system enabled the teams to identify the key attribute up to the extent of supplier parts that were determining the output quality of the engines and hence monitor them better

This unique project of replacing physical testing of engines with virtual testing using Industry 4.0 principle is a first- in-class is already demonstrating 40% reduction in cost of testing and 25% improvement in throughput.

The next 1- 3 years for any manufacturing organisation is about digitisation and using emerging technologies to solve business problems. Using this platform to aggregate data will help M&M improve various aspects of manufacturing like quality, maintenance and throughput. The ability to get machine data synced up with AI and IoT services will help M&M lead in Industry 4.0 era.