A deep dive into how maintenance organizations improved their planning and scheduling processes to save time and money.
Optimizing the planning and scheduling process doesn’t happen overnight. It depends upon numerous factors, including your manufacturing organization’s size; relationships between maintenance, production, and procurement groups; and reversing the reactive work mode. Perhaps the greatest factor, however, is the user-friendliness or usability of your CMMS, such as SAP. Poor user adoption and inefficient planning and scheduling functionality contribute to decreased wrench time and a mounting backlog. If you’re struggling with these issues, you’re certainly not alone.
The planning and scheduling process is even more complicated and challenging for large organizations with multiple sites and plants. For example, a leading European paper production company, with its 18 plant global growth over the years, needed a better solution to manage their 500,000 work orders a year work load. Understandably, the company was struggling with how to effectively schedule and plan this high volume of transactions since some plants were generating up to 3,000 work orders per month. The company was using standard SAP PM for its plant maintenance processes, which lacked a scheduling tool with a graphical interface to help its staff be efficient.
Aware of these user pain points, an IT leader began to search for a better solution that could support all sites. The company needed a tool that would help users plan and schedule with greater ease and a graphical interface that would allow them to easily visualize and modify scheduled activity.
A European building materials company also grappled with an overall lack of planning and scheduling functionality with standard SAP, and users knew that to improve and reduce downtime, they needed a better way to utilize their SAP system. One of the main issues was that their current system did not provide a graphical visualization of what had been scheduled. In addition, the company also wanted a solution that it could use to manage shutdowns and projects.
Across the ocean on a winding river in rural West Virginia, Century Aluminum was struggling with rising tension over smoothly and efficiently operating their five facilities. Ultimately, they determined it was necessary to implement the SAP Accounting, Purchasing, and Plant Maintenance modules. Century Aluminum went live with SAP in 2005.
Unfortunately, Plant Maintenance users did not receive sufficient training on how to properly execute work orders within the new SAP system. Users were exporting data out of SAP into Excel, which added extra steps and put data integrity at risk. Furthermore, their KPI reporting processes and procedures were inefficient because of issues with data extraction. After experiencing the difficulties of planning and scheduling within their existing system, Century Aluminum grew tired of their reliance on outside programs, such as Excel to plan, and organize work orders.
Hemlock Semiconductor faced similar challenges coordinating its plant maintenance work at its Michigan site due to archaic HR reporting and a complicated SAP system. Little to no time was available to schedule preventive maintenance because planners were overwhelmed with corrective maintenance scheduling and rescheduling. Mainly they were seeking a solution that would integrate HR and PM modules for all maintenance planning and scheduling.
A large global paper production company also had to turn its back on preventive maintenance due to a staggering backlog. The company, on average, creates 87,000 new work orders a month and had an average backlog of 169,000 work orders. Clearly, preventive maintenance was out of the question for this company, and thus downtime was frequent.
In addition, end users at the company wanted to address a number of shortfalls including a graphical view of scheduling and a more user-friendly interface. For example, changing work orders in standard SAP was a cumbersome process with no way to mass change fields, forcing users to spend countless hours navigating SAP rather than focusing on the science of planning and scheduling. Another challenge of using standard SAP was printing.
Simplifying the work order process would provide an immediate return on investment to the organization. In creating the business case for a new solution, the productivity improvements of SAP PM, when combined with the Prometheus suite of tools, were estimated at over $3.0M annually – for just one site.
With standard SAP, users across industries and regions encountered a number of challenges, including usability. The interface was cumbersome, even for experienced users. All of these companies were in search of a solution that would simplify the existing SAP system to eliminate data corruption and improve process efficiency. They also desired a tool that would work within their existing SAP infrastructure, scale to meet the demands of multiple sites, and require minimal customization. Sound familiar? Each of these companies found the answer in Prometheus Group’s PM Advanced suite. Check back next week for a discussion on the short- and long-term results of the PM Advanced solution!
