Outsourcing maintenance activities
Both in Maastricht and Lanaken in Belgium, there are two
paper machines of more than 100 metres in length that are
largely maintained by Sappi’s own technical service. In
Maastricht alone, 84 people work in the maintenance team,
partly in shifts, partly 9 to 5. “It certainly isn’t that we carry
out all the work ourselves,” explains Vandelaer.
“We also
outsource a large part of our maintenance activities.”
Whether they switch to outsourcing or not depends strongly on
the risk of damage. For example, in the Finishing department
in Maastricht, there are several cutting and packing machines.
If one of these machines is temporarily inoperative, the risk
of damage is considerably slighter than if one of the two
paper machines is idle. This is why we prefer to outsource the
maintenance in the Finishing department and carry out all
the maintenance on the paper machines ourselves. We asked
PDM to optimise the maintenance carried out on the
Maastricht site. The basic principle behind this was to increase
the availability of the various machines and installations and
to improve mutual communication between the Maintenance
and Production departments.
Approach
After identifying the current and future activities of the
maintenance teams at Sappi Maastricht and establishing the
bottlenecks in the present workflow, we designed a new
workflow. Among other things, gate-keeping was set up and the
necessary changes were made to the work preparation and
planning roles. PDM realised a clear
steering structure and unambiguous communication by
introducing performance indicators. A lot of attention was
also devoted to supervising middle management in their new
roles in the organisations. Using framework sessions, we
established everyone’s responsibilities and translated these
into a new organisation structure. To gear this new way of
working and the desired management information to each
other more effectively, we also tightened up the structure and
use of the SAP system for the maintenance department, and
also co-operation between Production and Maintenance.
Result
Based on a mutation plan, all changes in the organisation
were laid down and implemented. One remarkable difference
with the previous situation is that now there is a short
meeting between production and maintenance every day. All
the information exchanged is filtered here and, if necessary,
converted into practical maintenance instructions. There is
also feedback regarding completed actions during these
sessions.
“The result: a transparent, restructured organisation,
steering one of the maintenance organisations on the basis of
KPIs, and an optimised workflow,” says Vandelaer. “It’s too
soon to be able to establish whether we have actually saved
15% on our maintenance costs but the early results are
promising up to now.”
