Managing complex repairs and diagnostics

Although the manufacturing and repair business is not one often associated with business rules, nevertheless there are some interesting uses of business rules to be found. Two are outlined below.

First Seagate

Disk drive manufacturing may produce more than 50,000 drives per day at a single plant. Discs that fail their quality assurance check must have a determination of the fault and the proper repair strategy. Blaze Advisor, Fair Isaac's business rules management system, is used to drive Seagate’s automated fault diagnosis system. Rules may be updated by technicians and engineers without specialized computer programmers.  The system has reduced average diagnosis time from minutes to seconds and thus increased production capacity for the plant. In addition system diagnostic and remediation rules can be changed in days instead of weeks, improving the response time to new problems.

A detailed case study is available here.

Second a major storage hardware company.

Changing hardware or software configurations for storage systems in the field required approval from 4 or 5 specialized service reps. With a dramatically increasing case load the process had to be automated and accelerated.  A Blaze Advisor rules-based system analyzes system update requests to verify that the requested change complies with corporate policies and will not result in errors that would take the solution offline. This results in automated fast approval/disapproval of hardware or system update requests. In addition Blaze Advisor allows business users to easily change the rules governing updates as policies or technical requirements change.

Two manufacturing examples of using rules to do diagnostics and to manage repairs / changes so they are done right the first time. There are lots more uses in manufacturing especially around repairs, diagnostics, warranty claims and even design.