AI assistance for retail store equipment maintenance

Facility managers may become overwhelmed with dashboards from multiple equipment management platforms. The CORTIX platform is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) platform that focuses on predicting equipment behavior and either acts on the predictions or offers prescriptive recommendations in natural language. This enables facility managers to stay on top of store equipment operations with answers to key questions.

This enables users such as facility managers, and technicians, to:

1. receive information in advance on a problem with equipment
2. clearly understand what the problem is
3. get the recommended fix for the problem
4. prioritize and group actions based on the urgency
5. give feedback to improve the accuracy of future recommendations

When recommendations on the individual connected equipment are implemented, it helps the facility managers to bring visibility, agility and predictability to operations by:

1. reducing unplanned equipment downtime, which improves user experience and reduces emergency repair costs.
2. ensuring “early repairs” instead of “near to failure repairs”, thus reducing wear and tear of critical parts and avoiding costly replacements.
3. ensuring effective and comprehensive maintenance in each visit, increasing mean time between failures and the ‘time till the next maintenance visit’.
4. ensuring accurate repair every time, regardless of the experience level of the visiting technicians.

The CORTIX mobile app also facilitates collecting the feedback from the technicians. This helps to improve the accuracy of the predictions and collects data for building up cases to decide on effective replacements instead of repairs, for end-of-life equipment.

The CORTIX platform delivers value to retailers

In 2020, for a large retailer with 1,976 connected stores in North America, the platform enabled:

The CORTIX platform enables a new way of working with store equipment for maintenance and operations. The platform offers usage of its AI assistants* for most of the equipment categories from multiple Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), that are typically installed at retail stores including:

1. Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning – Roof top units (RTU, constant and variable volume), unit heaters, etc
2. Lighting – Dimmable and non-dimmable systems
3. Refrigeration Cases
4. Building Management System (BMS) Controllers – WebCTRL®^** controllers, Niagara Framework®^** controllers, etc.
5. Site Sensors and Meter Network

*The detailed catalog of capabilities of the AI assistant is available on request.

Each of the AI assistants cover multiple aspects of the above categories of equipment, be it mechanical, electrical, controls or connectivity problems. It also advises if the problem can be fixed remotely or needs a field visit. Recommended fixes are proactive, prioritized and context sensitive. This helps facility managers to utilize the right technical resources to solve developing problems at the right time and avoid costlier repairs.

Connecting to the CORTIX platform is simple with multiple BMS and IoT connectors available, including an open API for streaming data. A recommendation feed API from the platform is available for integrating with a retailer’s own business applications.