Reducing Costs through Root Cause Analysis

A global manufacturer faced slow, manual root cause analysis that took days or weeks, limiting their ability to quickly identify and resolve recurring issues.

The Challenge

Modernizing Root Cause Analysis for Complex Equipment

Root cause analysis on high-tech equipment can be slow and inefficient, especially when engineers need to manually search through thousands of PowerPoint files to find past issues and solutions. Identifying recurring errors this way often takes weeks and requires deep domain expertise.

One of our clients, a global equipment manufacturer, offers service contracts that include monitoring, maintenance, and post-error analysis. After a failure, their team investigates the root cause and checks for patterns in previous incidents to help prevent future downtime. However, this manual, document-heavy process was no longer scalable.

As product complexity increased, so did the need for a smarter approach. We helped them transition to a data-driven solution that accelerates analysis, reduces dependence on individual expertise, and surfaces insights in real time. The result is faster issue resolution and stronger long-term reliability.

The Solution

Automating Root Cause Analysis with Cloud and AI

To automate root cause analysis, we first migrated the entire database of problem and solution PowerPoints to Azure cloud storage. We set up automated pipelines to ensure all future files are uploaded seamlessly to the same location.

With the data centralized in the cloud, we connected it to a powerful search engine, enabling engineers to quickly search the entire database using keywords. To further accelerate this process, we developed a machine learning model trained on our customer’s historical data. This model provides smart suggestions based on search terms, helping engineers refine their queries without requiring deep domain expertise.

Finally, we used the low-code platform Mendix to build an intuitive user interface that integrates smoothly with existing systems, making advanced root cause analysis faster, easier, and more accessible.

The results

Issues solved in seconds, not weeks.

With our solution, the time spent on root-cause analysis to identify reoccurring issues went from multiple days or sometimes even weeks, to seconds. This means that the engineers can now easily cope with the growing number of serviced products, and our customer saves 40 hours of work (on average) per problem that occurs; time that can now be spent on improving the product. 

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