Background
Whether it’s game day, a backyard barbecue, or any other celebration, beer needs to be there—cold, ready, and waiting. Molson Coors’ Albany brewery makes that happen through round-the-clock production that can’t afford to stop.
For years, the maintenance team fought a losing battle against equipment failures, racing to fix problems after they happened, often in the middle of the night. Then they partnered with Augury to transform their approach. What started as skepticism about predictive, prescriptive maintenance has evolved into complete buy-in across three departments, with the team now catching problems weeks before they threaten production.
Challenge
Operating in isolation:
Manual vibration routes consumed half a day just to collect data, followed by hours analyzing “squiggly lines” without the benefit of second opinions or collaboration.
Missing critical runtime windows:
Essential brewing pumps only ran late at night during CIP cycles, making it impossible to monitor them during normal rounds and leaving the team blind to developing problems.
Losing equipment without warning:
The team lost critical assets regularly because problems stayed hidden until catastrophic failure, forcing expensive emergency repairs and scrambling for replacement parts that could take weeks to source.
The transformation journey
From uncertainty to confidence:
The team wondered how AI would impact their work. But as every alert revealed genuine issues—like misalignments off by mere thousandths—questions turned to conviction. Now they champion expansion to more assets.
From isolation to collaboration:
What started as individuals analyzing data alone has evolved into daily cross-department meetings. Brewing, utilities, and packaging teams now review each other’s equipment health together, catching patterns no single department would spot.
From reactive to strategic:
The team evolved from fighting fires to preventing them. With half-day manual routes eliminated, they now focus on root cause analysis, turning maintenance technicians into reliability engineers.
Our mechanics now catch misalignments measured in thousandths of inches. They’ve gone from fixing failures to preventing them—that precision saves us thousands in avoided damage.
Keys to Albany’s success
Technology as transformation tool
The team views AI through decades of experience—just as PLCs enhanced rather than replaced their work, continuous monitoring amplifies their expertise instead of threatening it.
Physical proof drives digital adoption
By printing alerts and attaching them to work orders, the team created tangible evidence that mechanics could see and trust, bridging the gap between AI insights and hands-on repairs.
Verify, validate, expand
The team built confidence by investigating every alert and confirming with multiple methods—when alerts consistently proved accurate, even skeptics became advocates for expansion.
