competence
Maintenance Evolution at Smurfit Kappa Oudenbosch Golfkarton BV (Etten-Leur)
Corrugated board producer Smurfit Kappa Oudenbosch Golfkarton BV at Etten Leur is undergoing a big culture change in their maintenance strategy. They are changing from a more or less corrective concept into a proactive (condition based) concept of maintenance.
This project started at the 1st of January 2007. For this type of industry it is quite new, tells maintenance manager Rob Teijgeman. It means a complete change of culture within the production organization and not just for a technical department.
(summary of the Dutch version in magazine Industrial Maintenance edition 5 – 2008, by Yves De Grootte)
“In no way one could speak about condition based maintenance, like it should be from the bases”, says Rob Teijgeman, explaining the situation when he starts working for Kappa in 2004 as interim maintenance manager. Most of the time it was firefighting to keep the equipment in production. When the Kappa Group joined the Smurfit organization, at the end of 2005, there was a nice possibility to start changing maintenance strategies. To use the RCM2 principles is just a small part of the strategy. No condition based measurements were executed. Sometimes oil samples were taken, thermography (internal insurance policy) was done or visual inspections, but without any analysis.
To make the new maintenance concept into a success, Teijgeman gave Ian Knight from Enluse BV the order to do an assessment. This took three days and on behalf of KPI’s was determined that there was a significant savings possibility in technical costs, like direct costs and stock values, but also in higher uptimes and more production of better quality of produced corrugated board.
After a presentation to the local and Benelux management, Teijgeman did get the commitment to start this project. The presentation showed that in a period of three years the ROI of this project was breakeven. After these three years the benefits will be high.
OEM suppliers
Also the OEM suppliers are involved in this change of management. Normally they do visual checks and change parts after a certain amount of running hours. That kind of service is old fashioned. Besides that the changing are not necessary it brings high costs. Parts are more expensive from the OEM supplier as when we buy them at the local distributors (sometimes three times higher in price). OEM suppliers do give services, but they are not very familiar with Proactive Maintenance Concepts .
What is involved in this project?
Ian Knight from Enluse BV explains. At first we did install an on-line condition monitoring system. Together with Hansford Sensors, Enluse BV designed dedicated sensors for the special applications, like corrugator roller bearings. The high temperatures, changing loads and speeds, and different kinds of paper used, made this necessary. Also transmitters were designed and build to transform vibration signals into 0 – 10 VDC, to be used for analog inputs from the Siemens S7 series PLC. Connected to a PC provided with a SCADA system we could visualize the measured values into graphics. In case anything strange should happen the operator will be able to react as soon as a trend is changing. Either he calls the technical department or Enluse BV when it is really critical. Enluse BV comes with their specialized equipment and connects it to the transmitter and they will read by analytics the problem. But what is more important, they can tell us what happened (to avoid re-occurrence) and schedule a maintenance work order. So the parts will be there in time to do the maintenance work and no breakdown will occur. In cases where on-line measurements are not applicable, we use the handheld system.
Another very important issue is the lubrication of equipment. After a Lubrication Assessment we decided to buy, install and implement the Lube It 4 software as recommended by Enluse BV. That is a special designed software for scheduling the lubrication tasks with a route planner. To perform proper lubrication Smurfit Kappa also invested in a new lube room, Oil Safe cans, Label Safe and Grease Safe. Cleanliness of the oil and greases is very important for a high plant reliability. The combination of all of this makes it hard to mix oils or greases and prevents contamination. To make this tool even stronger we also do analysis of the oils (and greases) too. All based on proactive maintenance. In relation with the condition monitoring we can compare the information and react proactive to avoid breakdowns and eventual damages of equipment.
These services were done by a Reliability Engineer from Enluse BV. He is the spider in the web and is coaching and training the technical staff. He facilitates the project, which takes three years all together.
ENCORRS BV is founded in 2008 and will took this over and calls it a Corrugating Reliability Plan.
At the end the benefits are:
• Higher Reliability and Availability of equipment
• Higher uptimes
• Lower technical downtimes
• Lower paper waste (less stops)
• Lower (maintenance) costs
• Lower spare parts stock
