Article | Performance & Productivity

Predictive Analytics – Enhancing productivity in large enterprises

Asset breakdowns are a costly – and inevitable – part of any business. Depending on the size and nature of your operation, downtime, containment, recovery and third-party costs could quickly rack up to thousands, or even millions, of dollars in cost.

The issue is pervasive. More than 80 percent of companies have experienced unexpected outages in the past three years, with the average unplanned downtime incident costing $276,000 and lasting up to four hours.

One way to keep these costs down is to routinely replace assets as a precautionary measure, but this can cut devices well short of their potential lifespan. Routine detection and maintenance efforts are another option but can be costly and time-consuming, particularly for large-scale enterprises, where PC asset fleets are often massive.

AI CAN HELP

Predictive maintenance tools can help, diagnosing failures well before they present a safety or operational threat. This is compared to a more traditional proactive approach, which finds and diagnoses issues once they have already occurred. In addition, these tools prolong their lifecycle far beyond that in a precautionary asset management approach.

The diagnosis, carried out by artificial intelligence, is often based on subtle indicators that may not be perceptible to us. For example, a tiny increase in decibel output from a PC fan may be symptomatic of an underlying technical issue. But this electrical whirring noise may sound the same day-to-day for a worker, with the fault going unnoticed until their computer comes to a standstill.

Likewise, an increase in heat output or a general performance slowing from a PC could foretell a maintenance issue. Your average employee may not spot this, but a predictive maintenance tool like Lenovo’s Device Intelligence, can predict impending failure with a confidence level as high as 85 per cent⁽¹⁾

PROACTIVE INSIGHTS

Lenovo Device Intelligence (LDI) has a self-learning component, meaning the tool will become increasingly adept over time at predicting breakdowns, based on the specific usage habits of your organisation.

LDI and similar tools are a type of what Gartner calls a ‘Digital experience monitoring’ solution. These solutions are designed to improve employee experience within the digital workplace. Business leaders and IT decision makers can use digital experience monitoring solutions to increase employee productivity and optimise helpdesk costs. 

In addition to identifying issues real-time across the fleet – including hardware functionality and problems causing performance degradation – LDI also shows users fleet-wide and granular insights into apps affecting performance, battery levels, storage and more. The upshot of this is enhanced uptime, cost and operational efficiency.

Predictive analytics can also forecast a cyber security breach before it takes hold. Using complex, analytics and big data, it can monitor network activity and report, in real time, any irregularities in traffic flow. With the average cyber-attack now costing $276,000, an increasing number of businesses are turning to these tools.

By helping IT proactively address PC health, end-user downtime is reduced and performance increases. At the same time, you can expect fewer helpdesk calls and less time diagnosing and fixing severe issues.

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⁽¹⁾ 85% accuracy rate for predicting the most common Blue Screens of Death prior to failure. Demonstrated under laboratory conditions when testing for the networking/telecom industry’s most common causes of BSOD WWServices-LDI_fly-IT-100120F-RL/PT