General Motors Co. has connected about a quarter of its 30,000 factory robots to the Internet and says that it is benefiting from less down time.

The Bloomberg news agency reports that in the last two years, GM has avoided 100 potential failures of vehicle-assembling robots by analyzing data sent to external servers in the cloud.

Bloomberg quotes Mark Franks, director of global automation, who spoke at an International Federation of Robotics (IFR) roundtable in Chicago on April 3. Connectivity is preventing assembly line interruptions and robot replacements that can take as long as eight hours.

In 2016, automotive factories installed 17,600 robots compared with 5,100 for electronics manufacturers and 1,900 for metal producers, according to the IFR.

Internet monitoring allows GM to order parts when it detects they’re wearing out instead of having to store them at the factory. That reduces inventory and saves money, Franks was quoted as saying.

GM has increased its new U.S. robot applications by 10,000 since 2012 while boosting U.S. employment by almost a third to 105,000, according to a report by the Association for Advancing Automation.

Franks said that GM is using robots that can work safely alongside humans in the factory that produces the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid.