K2025: Reifenhäuser tackles skills shortage with industrial AI

The extrusion machinery firm says recent studies show that the use of Industrial AI offers considerable potential for increasing OEE with improvements of up to 15%. Among other things, this is made 4/6 possible by reducing downtime and waste by up to 20%. In addition, cost savings are expected in the area of maintenance, which can be achieved through optimised service and spare parts planning.

"Google, OpenAI, and others are already impressively demonstrating what AI solutions can achieve in the consumer sector. However, AI is only as intelligent as the data it has been trained with,“ explains Jan Karnath, Chief Digital Officer (CDO) of the Reifenhäuser Group and responsible for the Next brand.

The portfolio is based on three product streams that seamlessly interlock:

NEXT.AI – Intelligent assistance systems

At the heart of NEXT.AI is an AI chatbot that provides real-time support to machine operators and service teams during ongoing operations. The AI accesses Reifenhäuser's comprehensive expertise in engineering, service, maintenance, and process technology – and, if desired, on the user's documentation and live production data. Operators receive immediately actionable recommendations via simple text entries (prompts) in the chatbot – for example, in the event of quality problems. Thanks to this support, even inexperienced employees can achieve optimal results. This reduces downtime, lowers service costs, and makes production processes more efficient.

NEXT.Learning – Knowledge as the key to success

To build up and establish the necessary expertise among plastics processors in the long term, NEXT.Learning offers a combination of on-site training and a digital learning platform. This is individually tailored to the needs of 3/6 customers and helps producers to retain expertise within the company despite staff turnover and make it available to new employees at any time. Thanks to the use of AI avatars, customers can access the virtual training courses in over 100 languages. On request, Reifenhäuser NEXT can also adapt and provide content very quickly to meet customer-specific requirements.

“By using natural language processing (NLP), we are democratising specialist knowledge for our global customer base in a whole new dimension. Initial pilot projects have generated extremely positive feedback and highlight the added value of our solution – especially for international customers whose production employees speak different local languages and, for example, do not have sufficient English skills,” explains Karnath.

NEXT.Data – Generating added value from data

The third product stream, NEXT.Data, enables producers to exploit the full potential of their production data. The data is automatically aggregated via robust system integrations (e.g., OPC UA or GraphQL) and displayed in clear dashboards using the ExtrusionOS application suite. ExtrusionOS is specially designed for the requirements of the plastics extrusion and packaging industry. Among other things, customers can use it to create real-time analyses and automated OEE calculations to make data-driven decisions.

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