E.ON partners with Sight Machine to equip factory with AI

E.ON takes Artificial Intelligence to the world of manufacturing companies. Customers from the industrial and commercial sectors will thus be able to intelligently increase the efficiency of entire machine parks and save energy costs at the same time. In order to make this future possible, E.ON has entered into a partnership with the US company Sight Machine.

Sight Machine is a software start-up based in San Francisco that has created an Internet of Things enabled digital manufacturing platform, which uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics to help address critical challenges in quality, productivity and visualisation.

Sight Machine’s expertise in the field of digital manufacturing is now being integrated with E.ON’s expertise in the energy industry to develop unique digital solutions for the European market that will enable the optimisation of energy and core manufacturing processes in unison. E.ON is the first energy company with which Sight Machine will cooperate in Europe. Alongside the partnership, E.ON Scouting and Co-Investment has made a venture capital investment into Sight Machine.

E.ON will use the technology to expand its own Optimum Platform. With Optimum, E.ON customers are already able to visualize their energy flows and rapidly identify potential improvements. Through the partnership, manufacturing and energy data are now turned into actionable information; customers will see improvements in operations, leading to increased profitability and reduced CO₂ emissions. Now machine uptime and utilisation will be improved through predictive maintenance, while production bottlenecks, quality issues, and energy optimisations will be identified by pulling and analysing available data from across manufacturing facilities.

“Sight Machine has outstanding software and references in the industrial sector. Together, we will make our business-to-business customers fit for the competition of the future with brand-new solutions. In addition, we are showing an intelligent and efficient way to achieve CO₂ savings in the economy,” affirmed Bernd Schumacher, CEO of E.ON Connecting Energies.

“In many manufacturing sectors, energy is a critical input and a significant source of cost variability,” added Sight Machine CEO and Co-Founder Jon Sobel. “The partnership of E.ON and Sight Machine will give manufacturers an unprecedented ability to evaluate how energy-related decisions will affect their productivity, quality and profitability,” he underlined.