Moving to mobility: How a dairy products maker raised its OEE

⇨ A dairy products manufacturer faced significant challenges due to a paper-based maintenance system, leading to unplanned downtime, increased costs, and difficulties in inventory management.

⇨ By updating their SAP enterprise asset management system with Sigga's Planning & Scheduling and Mobile Maintenance app, the manufacturer improved efficiency, reduced inventory costs, and streamlined maintenance processes.

⇨ The digital transformation of their EAM led to an increase in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) by over 1%, resulting in substantial financial savings through enhanced preventive maintenance and reduced operational delays.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is an important parameter for any manufacturer. A low OEE could mean higher manufacturing costs, which ultimately impact the manufacturer’s bottom line. A Europe-headquartered global dairy products maker faced this issue when a paper-based maintenance system slowed its processes, resulting in unplanned downtime and data quality issues.

The company uses an SAP enterprise asset management (EAM) system for its plant maintenance. However, the legacy solution relied heavily on manual updates for inventory management and data, which resulted in delays, inventory management and reporting errors, data quality issues, and the inability to track work times accurately.

The product was manufactured in a clean environment at all facilities. So, whenever a machine part had to be replaced, employees wasted time leaving and returning to the shop floor, spending around two hours daily on this task. Due to this reason, the company ended up hiring additional contractors or increasing overtime to keep the overall work and schedules unaffected, adding to the burgeoning cost of production.

Together, these challenges resulted in unplanned downtime for repairs, as employees were unable to keep up with preventive maintenance (PM), impacting production at profitability.

Trying to implement a consistent process across locations was challenging, which is when the manufacturer reached out for a solution that could help with PM, report generation and inventory management. They wanted to update the SAP EAM system, which was the cornerstone of all their data and ERP, through SAP Partner and SAP-certified solutions. Some of their must-haves for the updated system included:

• Consistent processes across sites
• Inventory management of parts in real-time
• Reduction or removal of PM backlog
• Lowering the stress on workers undertaking PM
• The ability to work offline and online due to dead spots at facilities
• Be globally scalable and available in multiple languages

The solution

The manufacturer finalized an update provided by SAP-certified partner Sigga to mobilize its ERP, which included two parts — the Sigga Planning & Scheduling for SAP software and the Sigga Mobile Maintenance app for SAP. While the former was designed to help the manufacturer get the right person at the right time with the right equipment and parts at the asset, the latter provided everything a maintenance person might want on a mobile device.

The upgrade provided the manufacturer with a complete solution to its paper-based challenges with plant maintenance. With the software, they could reduce inventory costs and lower backlogs, as everything was ordered as needed, allowing the maintenance crew to get the parts on time.

The app gave the maintenance tech real-time access to drawings, instruction guides, and work history, among other things, for which they had to leave the shop floor previously.

What the update meant for the manufacturer

In this case, Sigga, helped the manufacturer gain material value by digitally transforming its EAM to one that was more user-friendly and improved the producer’s output through faster, more efficient maintenance at a lower cost through the Sigga Planning & Scheduling for SAP and The Sigga Mobile Maintenance app for SAP.

Using the two solutions in tandem made maintenance work more productive and efficient. Permits could now be made available in real-time, and work orders were closed as soon as the task was completed. Users could have a flow that asked appropriate questions based on the work done in real-time. All this information was then returned through the software and app to the SAP EAM, resulting in a much more accurate process and data.

Inventory management also became easier as the mobile maintenance app allowed workers to look up and book parts in advance, resulting in fewer trips to the warehouse and saving around 2.5 hours per day per employee.

Digitalizing its EAM thus helped the dairy products manufacturer improve its OEE by over 1%, translating to millions of dollars in savings, as it could perform more PMs to ensure smooth operations.