From raw factory data to smarter maintenance

How can Generative AI (GenAI) help reliability engineers to spot issues earlier and reduce downtime? As part of Vlerick’s full-time MBA programme, students teamed up with NLMK Europe for a hackathon that turned unprocessed maintenance logs into an actionable GenAI concept with clear next steps.

A good hackathon has energy; a great one has impact, with better questions, clearer thinking and outputs that people can and want to use on the factory floor. That’s what happened when our full-time MBA students teamed up with NLMK Europe for a first GenAI hackathon, which was built around a reality every industrial site recognises: maintenance teams don’t lack data, they lack time. “Production data sounds structured in a classroom but in reality they’re not,” says Martin Butler, Professor of Management Practice in Digital Transformation, who helped shape the business case. “A combination of human and machine capturing leads to missing elements, language inconsistencies and different levels of detail.” Together with Vladimir Vashurkin, Smart Manufacturing Lead at NLMK Europe, Martin brought a live operational context into the classroom. “The students didn’t get a polished sandbox. They got real data and a real persona to step into… and one afternoon to make sense of it all.”