Global petrochemicals producer Huntsman produces products for a variety of end-use applications. With 11,300 employees, Huntsman companies operate in 22 countries, generating annual revenues of approximately $15 billion.
Huntsman's Rozenburg facility in the Netherlands is comprised of six plants, with 61 maintenance group employees and five main contractors servicing the facility's piping, cleaning, scaffolding and insulation, electrical and instrumentation, and craning. Approximately 60% of Rozenburg's maintenance work is shutdown-related and 40% ongoing routine maintenance; contractor hours for routine maintenance and construction amount to approximately 3,000 per week on average, resulting in an overall total spend of 350,000 hours per year.
A Segmented Approach
At the beginning of 2003, Huntsman engaged an outside consulting firm to perform an analysis of the Rozenburg facility. The analysis identified two areas for improvement related to the maintenance operations: worker productivity and overhead cost reduction.
Since planning of shutdown and routine maintenance work were not coordinated across the six Rozenburg plants, maintenance resources were allocated according to peak demands, resulting in significant inefficiencies during low demand periods. At the same time, maintenance workers often found themselves waiting long hours for work assignments and permits due to a lack of communication between plants and departments.
In the absence of a centralized system, planning and scheduling were completed by each plant individually, resulting in unusually high overhead. Furthermore, much of the planning was done repeatedly because of the lack of historical data.
Centralizing Maintenance Through Integration
To streamline the planning and execution of maintenance work, Huntsman Rozenburg decided to consolidate these processes under one fully automated and integrated system via Impress for EPM, an SAP-certified packaged integration application from Impress Software of Waltham, MA. Primavera Systems, Inc -- the project management application vendor -- and SAP were already in use at Huntsman to manage its assets and maintenance projects. By adding Impress, the company hoped to use these applications to their full potential.
"Within a very short implementation timeframe, Impress delivered a solid integration solution, which plays a vital role in our new daily maintenance processes," says Roland la Rivière, Maintenance Area team leader for Huntsman.
The Impress solution, integrating SAP with Primavera, enables centralized planning of routine maintenance, construction, and shutdown work across all six Rozenburg plants. Members of a newly formed Planning and Contracting team now receive work orders entered by the maintenance area teams into SAP, distribute tasks to the different disciplines, and allocate the appropriate resources.
The information is then automatically transferred into Primavera, where resources are leveled by integrating routine maintenance, shutdown, and construction work. Completed work data is then updated in SAP, where it can be accessed for reporting and future planning of similar jobs.
The Results
Integration improved the planning and coordination capabilities of both internal and contractor personnel.
"Having a centralized maintenance planning tool with a robust interface to SAP PM to schedule our internal personnel as well as contractors is a key element in achieving the anticipated savings in maintenance operations," says la Rivière.
"Having a fully automated integration maximizes resource leveling and productivity," says Peter Spiegelenberg, manager of the Rozenburg Planning and Contracting Team. "At the same time, we were able to reduce our overall planning and coordination personnel from 65 to less than 56 employees.
"It is extremely beneficial that our personnel from different areas can communicate with one another based upon the same information, yet each of them uses their own preferred planning layout," he continues. "With better communication among all parties, we have seen significant improvement in employee productivity and morale."
Spiegelenberg expects even greater improvements moving forward: "We have a large number of repetitive jobs and activities; the ability to pull up data from previous occasions and activities will greatly reduce the costs of these jobs over time."
