RIX: Real-time Intelligence eXpert
RIX is a planned AI add-on for ProAlert™: an intelligence layer that lives on top of your manufacturing data and captures the knowledge that currently walks out of the plant when an experienced technician retires.
Read this first: RIX is not part of ProAlert today. It is on the active roadmap and is planned to be available for purchase as a separate add-on when it is released. Everything below is design intent, not shipped capability. If you need a capability now, the fourteen disciplines are what is running in plants today, and we would rather tell you that plainly than sell you a roadmap.
The Problem RIX Is Aimed At
Manufacturing plants lose critical knowledge when experienced workers leave, and roughly a quarter of the manufacturing workforce is expected to retire within five years. The knowledge that goes with them is rarely written down anywhere:
"Joe knows why Machine 5 acts up on humid days." "Maria always checks the hydraulic pressure first on that press." Neither of those is in a manual, and neither survives a retirement party.
ProAlert already records what happened: every work order, every part consumed, every downtime call, every scrap event, on one database. RIX is the layer that would read that record and turn it into a suggestion at the moment somebody needs it. That ordering matters... the intelligence layer is only possible because the operational record exists first.
Design Principles
Planned Capabilities
Work order decision trees
Raising a good work order takes tribal knowledge: which skills are needed, which parts are usually required, how long it should take, what safety precautions apply. RIX would guide the person through it. A technician reporting spindle vibration on a CNC mill gets asked whether it is constant or intermittent; constant points at spindle bearings and loads one template, intermittent points at tool holder balance and loads another. When it started and at what speeds it occurs narrow it further, separating bearing resonance from a mounting alignment problem.
Trees that learn from outcomes
The point is that the trees would not be static. On completion RIX captures the parts actually used, the actual time and the actual root cause, compares them against what it predicted, and proposes a change when a pattern emerges: "In the last 30 days, 8 of 10 spindle vibration work orders were actually caused by coolant contamination, not bearings. Should I add a coolant check to the tree?" A traditional decision tree is written once by an engineer and goes stale quietly.
Tribal knowledge capture
Four routes into the same store: pattern analysis across work orders, so that "senior techs resolve this three times faster" becomes a question about what they do differently; annotation, where an experienced worker adds "on this machine, also check the grounding"; plain language capture, where somebody tells RIX that a clicking hydraulic press is usually the relief valve rather than the pump; and outcome tracking, so the store is corrected by what actually worked.
Real-time pattern detection
| Pattern | Example | What RIX would raise |
|---|---|---|
| Quality drift | Scrap rate rising on Machine 3 | "Scrap up 40% in the last 2 hours... tool wear?" |
| Recurring issue | Same downtime code three times this week | "Machine 7 has E-stopped 3 times... escalate to engineering?" |
| Correlation | Defects spike after the lunch break | "Quality dips 15% post-lunch... training opportunity?" |
| Prediction | Material usage trending high | "At the current rate, Part X is exhausted in 4 hours" |
Status and Honest Answers
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Can we buy RIX today? | No. It is on the active roadmap and is planned as a separately purchasable add-on when released. It is not in the base platform. |
| Is there a release date? | Not one we will publish. We would rather commit to a date we can hold than one that sounds good on a website. Talk to us if the timing matters to a decision you are making. |
| Will it be able to change our data? | No, by design. SQL views only, read-only, no insert, update or delete. |
| Do we need RIX to get value from ProAlert? | No. The fourteen disciplines are the platform and they are shipping today. RIX is a layer on the data those disciplines already produce. |
| Does buying ProAlert now commit us to RIX later? | No. It is an add-on, priced and purchased separately if and when you want it. |
Interested in RIX, or in what ships today?
Tell us which. We will be straight with you about what is running in plants now and what is still on the roadmap.
