“Right. Let’s increase efficiency first.”
Maintenance Management at Bavaria
| “Right. Let’s have a Bavaria first.” That’s the advertising slogan of the brewer in the Dutch province of North Brabant. Huge quantities of beer and soft drinks leave the brewery in Lieshout every day. But those quantities could be even bigger, as top management realised a number of years ago. The efficiency of the production lines had to be increased – and it was increased. Partly thanks to Stork. |
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Stork tracked down potential sources of faults
Bavaria wanted to achieve the highest possible availability of its process equipment at the lowest possible costs. And that’s exactly what Stork Maintenance Management specialises in. Armed with a range of tools including a Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA), Stork tracked down potential sources of faults, after which these were analysed and the ways to prevent them were identified. As a pilot, this approach was first tested on one production line, based on a performance related contract between Bavaria and Stork.
New maintenance concept
Fred Wammes, head of technical services of the bottling plant, explains that Stork first of all carried out an in depth study of the historical fault data. “That allows you to find out quickly where the most frequent and biggest problems are located. And that’s handy, because it means you can then get results quickly.” Those results consisted not only of changes, but most importantly of a completely new maintenance concept: a major overhaul each year, supported by a balanced package of preventive maintenance carried out by operators, technicians and specialists.
“Maximum availability at low costs.”
F. Wammes, head of technical services, Bavaria bottling plant.
The human factor
After an initial flying start, no further improvements were made for some time. Together with Stork it was found that technical skills alone are not enough to achieve further efficiency improvements. In hindsight, Wammes and Stork regional team leader Michel Weeda concluded that ‘the human factor’ was the key to further successes.
Knowledge and expercience
Weeda: “In general, maintenance technicians made little use of the knowledge and experience of the production personnel. By making sure they do that, we can prevent large numbers of smaller faults.” As Bert Meijer, project leader at Bavaria on behalf of Stork, explains: “Production personnel know the machines inside-out. They know exactly what the reasons for interruptions and slowdowns are. We’ve made use of that knowledge. We have redefined the maintenance tasks, addressed modifications and improved the operating instructions.”
Efficiency
Through this approach, the efficiency of line 9 was improved significantly, by several per cent in less than six months. That success set the scene for further improvements, so the method was also applied to six other lines. Three of these have been completed successfully at the time of printing this leaflet, while the results of three others still have to be measured. But what is already clear is that the overall target of average efficiency at a sustainable record level is achievable for the Bavaria bottling plant.
Secret of succes
According to Weeda, the secret of success is the attention that Stork and Bavaria have given to technical issues, organisation and systems (together with sister company Stork Real, Stork Maintenance Management implemented the SAP PM R/3 module in the bottling plant), as well as a strong focus on efficiency and careful communication about it with all those involved.
“That takes time”, recognises Jan Renier Swinkels, director of Production and Logistics. “We made hardly any measurable progress for about twelve months, but the substantial investments that we made in people during that period have delivered results in the last few months: the efficiency has taken a big leap forward.”