The AI Agent Saving Maintenance Teams from Time-consuming Admin

This blog is based on one of the use cases from the UNITED VARS Insight Brief ‘AI Across Borders: What Works, What Fails, and Why’.

“With our ‘Ask Odin’ AI agent, suddenly all the information and knowledge and data gathered for years in your SAP environment is available at your fingertips.” – Lars Bork Dylander, Managing Director, SOA People Denmark

What Slows Maintenance Teams Down

Maintenance knowledge is often spread across multiple systems and manuals. Many of the most valuable insights aren’t formally documented, including practical know-how about how equipment behaves in real conditions.

This becomes a bigger problem when experienced technicians retire or leave. Critical on-the-job knowledge goes with them, leaving more junior technicians to piece together answers from disconnected sources. That search is slow, frustrating, sometimes impossible, especially across different plants and countries.

Technicians also spend hours a day on admin: logging work orders, checking parts availability, and recording time instead of their main tasks.

UNITED VARS member, SOA People Denmark, has built an AI agent called ‘Ask Odin’ that solves these issues for global mid-market manufacturers running an SAP environment.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL AI INSIGHT BRIEF HERE →

Odin Improves OEE and Resolves Issues Faster

Organizations using Ask Odin typically achieve up to 5% increase in plant throughput by improving OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness), resolving issues faster and spending less time on admin tasks.

Ask Odin is a conversational AI agent built on SAP Plant Maintenance, and is compatible with ECC, SAP S/4HANA private cloud, and S/4HANA public cloud. Technicians interact with it through natural conversation (voice or text) rather than navigating SAP screens.

With Ask Odin, maintenance teams can:

• See prioritized work orders at the start of a shift, with guidance on what to tackle first based on urgency and location

• Check spare-part availability across sites and make reservations in the same conversation

• Access repair guidance and maintenance documents for specific equipment in their own language

• Log time, stock usage, and task completion as part of the workflow, without separate data entry

• Capture and share lessons learned, so practical knowledge is no longer lost or locked in individuals’ heads 

Scaling AI Globally

“We can roll this out to plants anywhere in the world in local languages, and tailored to how each plant runs, while keeping the overall approach consistent. That’s a major strength of the UNITED VARS global alliance.” – Lars Bork Dylander, Managing Director, SOA People Denmark

When rolling out Ask Odin across global sites, it only needs localization at the operational level. Ask Odin already supports multiple languages, so it can read documentation in one language and respond to technicians in another.

However, every plant runs differently, even within the same company. UNITED VARS members can adapt the AI solution to those local processes and ways of working in each market .

AI Across Borders: What Works, What Fails, and Why

This use case is one of the examples of successful global AI from the UNITED VARS Insight Brief, ‘AI Across Borders: What Works, What Fails, and Why’.

This AI Insight Brief is useful for UNITED VARS members and their clients: CIOs, CFOs, and technical project leaders at mid-market global companies.

Download it here for insights from our global alliance into successfully scaling AI.

Mid-sized companies should go global without losing speed or local identity. UNITED VARS brings together hand-picked local market leaders with real people on the ground in 100+ countries to remove legal, cultural, and language barriers. As a strategic alliance, UNITED VARS provides clear accountability from start to finish. UNITED VARS is the world's only SAP Platinum Partner alliance, delivering end-to-end SAP services for the mid-market.

stronger than one.