Solution · Engineering
Every incident starts the same way: a controls engineer building the same query against MES, the historian, and a stack of shift logs. Foreman runs that query as an agent — ranks the hypotheses, gathers the evidence in parallel, and leaves an audit trail your quality team can sign off on.
The pain
When something stops running, the controls engineer opens three windows: the MES event log, the historian view, and last night's shift handover note. They run the same query they ran the last six times, in the same order, looking for the same shape. The first hour of every incident is reconstruction work that should have been automated five years ago.
Hypotheses are tested serially because the engineer can only be reading one window at a time. By the time the third one comes back inconclusive, the line has been down for forty minutes and someone has decided to 'just restart it' to see what happens. The post-mortem records 'unknown cause, recurrent' — which is the same thing it recorded last time.
The audit trail is whatever someone remembered to type into the incident ticket on the way out. Six months later, when the OEM asks why a similar defect appeared on a similar press, nobody can reconstruct what was looked at and what was ruled out — only what was eventually fixed.
What Foreman does about it
Foreman doesn't dump a flat list of correlations. It produces ranked hypotheses — most-likely cause first, with the supporting signals, the historical analogues, and the confidence score — so your engineer reads the case before they read the data.
Built on · Decision Layer
Every hypothesis pulls its own evidence in parallel: MES events, historian traces, operator notes, prior tickets. What used to be three windows opened serially is one structured brief delivered in the first minute.
Built on · Agent Engine
Every step the agent took, every signal it weighted, every alternative it ruled out — captured automatically. When the audit asks 'why this corrective action and not another one', the reasoning is in the record. No reconstruction.
Built on · Decision Layer
Your engineers define the playbook. Foreman's RCA loop runs whatever 5-Why or Ishikawa pattern your plant already uses — encoded once, run on every incident. When you change the playbook, the next incident uses the new version.
Built on · Agent Engine
What we'd move
From incident to a ranked hypothesis set with evidence, vs. the manual 'first hour' baseline.
Hypotheses surfaced per incident, each scored — never a single confident-wrong answer.
Steps, signals weighted, and alternatives ruled out — captured in the audit trail by default.
* Discovery-stage estimates from incident walkthroughs in Tier-2 stamping plants. Replaced with measured numbers as pilots run.
The one outcome that matters
We won't pretend the agent always has the right answer. It produces the ranked case your engineer would have built, in the time it takes them to walk to the line. That's the metric we measure: how much of the first hour comes back.
Where it lands
MES events
Wonderware, Opcenter, FactoryTalk, Ignition — downtime reasons, alarms, operator actions, part genealogy. Foreman reads the structured layer your team already records against.
Historian
OSIsoft PI, Aveva, MQTT, OPC-UA — process parameters, asset signals, derived KPIs. Aligned to MES events to the millisecond so cause and effect land in the same trace.
Tickets & shift logs
Maximo, SAP PM, Jira, your in-house tools. Past tickets feed historical analogues; current tickets are the destination the agent writes into.
Foreman is read-only on production systems by default. Writes land only in your incident-ticket workflow, scoped to drafts your engineers approve. See the full integration list →
Industry fit
A 30-minute call to walk through one real incident — the systems your engineer had to read, the hypotheses ruled out, and where Foreman would have started.
