Back in October at IFS World Conference 2016, some delegates from William Grant & Sons explained their asset management journey from a primarily reactive maintenance situation to a far more proactive mindset.
AMIS is the Asset Management Information Service they used to assess their performance. Today, that journey has obviously not stopped and the company looks to continuously improve.
They explained what the audit entails, an external independent management consultancy assess and benchmarks an organization’s performance against a range of factors. Their main packaging facility at William Grant & Sons in central Scotland produces 14 million crates of whiskey per annum. In five audits, over five years, they have achieved world-class status in enterprise asset management (EAM).
As we consider that journey, we have to think through the efforts and direction needed; simple metrics like the percentage completion of work that is planned vs. completed weekly. Once that metric is under control, managed and understood, the next step is to increase the volume of work planned.
Many techniques for identifying the root cause of breakdowns, minor stoppages and reduced speed issues were also introduced to include RCA, FMECA, REM and TPM. It is clear that these initiatives, together with an attention to detail, are the main foundations for the improvements. However, a flexible EAM solution can help, for example, with data quality.
Improving data quality
In this modern era of digital disruption, I just want to talk about one way in which data quality can be improved. A common challenge in work order management is to get the very busy maintenance techs to report in what they found and what they did to rectify the problem. This is vital to investigating the root causes of the stoppage. Even with modern mobile solutions, there is still a requirement for a tech to type or select some drop-down options. So what about using voice input?
Back last year, we showcased our capabilities and today, a straightforward ‘Talk to the ERP’ interface is being commonly used. As digital technologies are introduced for consumers to interact with modern systems, we shouldn’t lose the momentum in ensuring that our business systems can keep pace. I am not suggesting that William Grant & Sons is using this technology; they are not… yet. However, if I return to the benefits that they have realized from the focus on asset management excellence, the facts speak for themselves.
Benefits to the business
Cost to CARV is at 3.1%, against a global benchmark of 3%.
Total maintenance costs against total manufacturing costs are at 10% of the benchmark (10-15% on the low end). Maintenance is not sucking the life out of the business. Engineering downtime is down and 22% of the time is now spent on continuous improvement.
They have massively improved the bottles per minute against the theoretically available time significantly through this process. And, reporting improvements mean it is much easier to spot persistent problems and apply resources to resolve them. Basically, it’s a culture change – we’re now a data-driven maintenance team, which turns to IFS first to figure out what needs doing.
It’s hard to argue with data. We pull the data out of the systems and it takes the emotions and perceptions out of the story.
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