ESS/Bulmers win Management award at the 2010 National Maintenance & Asset Management Awards

The ESS Ltd./Bulmers project, headed up by Philip Lawlor, ESS Ltd. was titled: ” Supporting the Continuous Flow of Product through Operator Asset Care & Maintenance Planning”.

The project commenced due to a major reduction in numbers within the maintenance department and it was recognised that the only way the plant could continue to survive was if a substantial part of the existing maintenance workload was transferred to operators and the remaining maintenance people were helped to do their work as efficiently as possible through good planning.

Managing Director of Bulmers, Aidan Murphy, told employees “The performance of the site for the month of June 2010 was fantastic, with a production output of 188k hls (18.8m litres) which was 39k hls (+26.6%) ahead of plan and the OEE’s for the lines were up 2%. Despite this dramatic surge in volume the site continued to deliver the highest service levels with 100% of customer orders being met on time.

Contributing factors to these successes were both the CMI Service facilitated Front Line Asset Care programme (FLAC) and Maintenance Planning. These contributing factors supported the continuous flow of product by increasing the Operator Ownership of equipment and sustaining gains through good practice maintenance planning.

FLAC has been introduced across 5 production lines which has comprised so far in the focused improvement for 57 individual assets each requiring a unique set of care plans; this involved the staggered participation of 17 operators and 8 maintenance technicians over a period of 12 months.

The challenges in terms of continuous flow of product and requirement to gain buy from people was achieved through the development of standardised project plans and awareness material that enabled repeatability of the implementation processes across multiple teams and assets.

Specifically, this meant the development of new business processes and subsequent training to enable the setting up of a weekly planning meeting between the production & maintenance managers. Every week we create a workable maintenance plan using the prioritised requests from operators and technicians and work to improve planning performances through a “completed versus planned” KPI.

Feedback from the operators and technicians has confirmed their confidence in the systems; this is demonstrated through the continued involvement in capturing improvement ideas plus the completion of FLAC and planned work.

At the The National Maintenance and Asset Management Project Awards 2010, Certificates of Maintenance Excellence were presented to Bombardier, Centocor and Diageo/Dalkia at Kilkenny Brewery. Next up from that were the two Category Awards – Management and Technology with Pfizer Pottery Road winning the Technology award and ESS/Bulmers winning the Management award. The final award on the night, The Overall Award, went to ELAN.