A maintenance process to give Nordic industry a boost

Sören Jansson, Coor’s Technology Manager, is convinced that a structured working method with processes, templates and routines, creates a maintenance delivery that lifts customer profitability through increased production and reliability.

“If production isn’t reliable, consequential costs like overtime and delayed deliveries increase. With our processes, we ensure that the right things are done at the right time and at the right quality. With consistent working methods, everyone in the company understands the process, and what they should be doing.”

If, for example, the speedometer in your car displayed meters per second, you’d actually have a precise measure of how fast you’re driving, and for some people, that would be enough. But many others would find interpreting it difficult. If speed is displayed in kilometers per hour, making decisions to increase or decrease speed would be easier, and the same applies to our operations within the industry—we need to understand the quantities we’re working with.

“Everyone should report in the same way, we need to use the same parameters for information to be useful. When the process is the same at all sites, we can transfer resources easily to where they have the greatest benefit, or draw conclusions from other people’s experiences. Consistent working methods mean you know what you need to do straight away. This means we can put the best team together quickly,” says Sören.

Coor Maintenance Way should ensure effective maintenance—and preferably no remedial maintenance at all. But in this case, you have to analyze and be able to predict which problems might arise, and how to avoid them. Another measure Coor has taken to improve the quality of its delivery is its decision to certify all technicians and managers that work on maintenance to the EFNMS (European Expert in Maintenance Management) standard.

Maintenance activities affect the profitability of all manufacturing businesses. First and foremost, there has to be a functional work order process. Everyone must know what to do and how to report it. The next step is to analyze, with some machinery being affected by stoppages more often than others, some being more important than others—so how can we manage resources for maximum usage?

“In fact, maintenance is a value-creating activity, although sometimes, it can be hard to define and hard to link specific revenues to maintenance activities executed. What’s a reasonable cost to avoid incurring production stoppages? What costs are good costs? What challenges does the company face? The allocation has to be right and you have to adopt a holistic view for the whole production chain,” adds Sören.

Often, Coor provides support to businesses that want to lift productivity, or may be facing new investments. Sören has experience of some production sites that haven’t invested in 30 years.

“They don’t have the recent experience necessary for taking the right decisions and analyzing things correctly. We have specialists that work on these issues every day, so they know the latest on how machinery should be tested and can question supplier info. Our aggregate experience of different sites and sectors means our conclusions are based on several different solutions, so we know what the best practice is.”

Coor Maintenance Way is one of three processes Coor has defined to quality-assure and rationalize its deliveries to industry:

• Coor Maintenance Way (CMW), maintenance processes that support profitability and higher reliability through channels including managing reporting, histories and KPIs to safeguard analysis and subsequent improvement work.
• Coor Project Management (CPM), project management and project control processes that ensure that project milestones, documentation and reporting/steering committee work are conducted in accordance with best practice.
• Coor Industrial Engineering (CIE), production technology and production management processes to ensure that our approach to improvement work, production follow-ups, investment work, LEAN, etc. are managed equally.