T.A. Cook partnered with a leading metallurgical company to transform how it maintained its assets. The business had expanded quite rapidly over the years, taking over production facilities from other companies. However, huge inefficiencies and waste had crept in across its five worldwide sites and it was running out of cash. Following recent workforce reductions, the technicians were also operating on far less manpower. Here are some of the game-changers we helped implement:

After far-reaching analysis, T.A. Cook’s expert advisers realized that the maintenance of equipment needed a thorough overhaul, in order to boost profits and make the technicians’ workload manageable. One of the most pressing issues was realistic preventive and corrective work order management. After investigating, our experts realized that for instance equipment inspections were being allocated eight hours; in reality they were only taking 2-3 hours. We focused on introducing new corporate expectations as part of planning (such as: work method, time, cost per assignment), and scheduling of workers and their assignments. These all constituted a surge in available man-power. T.A. Cook also ushered in a new approach to maintaining automized equipment. For example, by monitoring the vibration of fans, maintenance activity alerts would be triggered in SAP PM. All our changes were backed up with workshops and training for staff.

We helped our client break the vicious cycle of corrective maintenance by dramatically reducing the need for expensive, unplanned machine repair work. We also increased  the monitoring of spare part availability. We managed to boost Hands on Tool Time (HoTT) to 50% as a result of improved planning, scheduling and alignment with productions. Planning accuracy of maintenance activities increased to 84% and maintenance schedule compliance to 87%. This hugely increased the amount of value-added employee time, bolstered by strong top management support to make sure all the changes were sustainable. By collecting data from various sensors – and importantly understanding what to do with it - huge costs were saved thanks to inspections and preventative maintenance programs.