AI in Building Products

At Owens Corning's Tessenderlo plant in Belgium, Waites' AI-driven predictive maintenance system detected a critical temperature spike on the non-drive-end main bearing of the 40-year-old Ball Mill #5 on February 26, 2024, preventing an unplanned shutdown that would have faced a 17-week lead time for a replacement end shaft. The company avoided over $11.24 million in potential production losses, repairs, and downtime — a 21,600% ROI — and has since expanded wireless vibration and temperature monitoring to 24 facilities worldwide.

Shandong Jinxin Air Conditioning Group fitted multiple types of sensors to traditional textile workshop fans and used the Inspur Yunzhou Industrial Internet Platform to collect and train on the data, producing fans that adjust air volume in real time. Chairman Wu Zicai told People's Daily the fans control temperature and humidity precisely and cut maintenance cycles by 40%.

Daikin, a leading worldwide provider of HVAC solutions, has built a remote monitoring and predictive maintenance system on AWS to help end customers monitor their HVAC systems more effectively and predict/reduce downtime. Daikin HERO Cloud Services is a remote monitoring platform for Daikin HVAC systems: the HERO Simple Edge device connects to outdoor units with a built-in SIM card for wireless connectivity, then communicates with AWS IoT Core to send real-time telemetry data to the AWS cloud. HVAC systems contribute around 40% of energy consumption in a typical commercial facility, and most HVAC maintenance is reactive — failure detection, root cause analysis, and technician dispatch all take time and extend system downtime. Daikin's remote monitoring approach transforms HVAC maintenance from reactive to predictive, enabling advance notice of trouble and prompt service response for facility managers.