A deep dive into how maintenance organizations improved their planning and scheduling processes to save time and money.
Since day one our solutions were born from the ideas and suggestions of our end users; people who struggled daily with various aspects of SAP. For example, schedulers who were afraid to take vacation because it was impossible to plan more than a week in advance due to such little visibility into the schedule and resources. Or wrench time as low as 20-30% because tools and materials were not available on time.
We know that many of our readers experience the same pressure, so we felt it would be useful to publish a series on how real companies have improved their maintenance processes.
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Over the next six weeks, we’ll take a deep dive into how ten companies, from various industries and with a diverse set of challenges, were able to make changes to their planning and scheduling process that allowed them to greatly improve productivity.
For Hemlock Semiconductor, the core challenge was eliminating data corruption by fusing HR data with planning and scheduling data in the PM module. Integration of these key components would make work availability accessible directly from the HR module, giving them complete visibility.
Century Aluminum also struggled with an overall lack of data integrity. Without it, forget visibility and accurate reporting. Eliminating data gaps and points of possible failure allowed Century Aluminum to optimize performance and simplify planning and scheduling.
Ballance Agri-Nutrients grappled with what might seem like a relatively small issue—an inability to manipulate and easily print shop papers in SAP. But, in reality this was costing them thousands of dollars and an enormous amount of craft time. Later in this series we’ll explore how Ballance used the Print Manager solution to enable automated printing within SAP.
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While each of the companies highlighted in this series had unique business requirements and diverse maintenance challenges, a common source of pain was an overall lack of user friendliness with standard SAP and a loss of data integrity after moving data from SAP to a third party system. For each company, manipulating data outside SAP inevitably led to inaccuracies in resource planning and scheduling visibility, and left end users and business unit leaders in search of a better solution that could drive improved business results.
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