Maintenance Management at Hexion
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More structure in the maintenance organization. In brief, that’s what Stork Asset Management Solutions has achieved at Hexion in Duisburg. Last year the company asked Stork to detach an interim maintenance engineer/coach maintenance manager to their site in Germany on a project basis. “The operational processes in our maintenance organization weren’t running smoothly and efficiently. And in any case maintenance management did not have the highest priority because of all kinds of developments. That’s why we asked for some help and support in that area. And I’m very glad we did so”, says Uwe Neumann, Technical Production Leader at Hexion Duisburg. The project ran for one-and-a-half years and was completed at the end of October 2008.  Read further...
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Hexion is a petrochemical company that produces raw materials for the paints, adhesives and plastics industries. For Stork's interim maintenance manager/coach Menno van den Berg it was an exciting challenge to implement the Stork Asset Management methods, know-how and maintenance best practices from many different industries in the 'chemical' city of Duisburg. "Together with Uwe I reviewed the maintenance policy and where necessary improved it. We also optimized the information systems and from the maintenance department we initiated improvement processes in relation to production. We had quite a lot of discussions about maintenance strategies and asset management. These sometimes revealed the cultural differences between the Dutch and German approaches. 'We' are in general more open-minded in looking at the overall picture, while 'they' tend to be somewhat more focused on hierarchy and the technical aspects. But we still managed to reach a good solution together!"
Quality
According to Uwe the strength of Stork is not only its vision on maintenance excellence, but also the ability to put concepts into action. "Stork gave us the advice we needed to implement a fresh maintenance strategy. And they also took care of the implementation. Thanks to application of their best practices we have been able to improve our maintenance performance and to make the required changes where necessary. All in all, the quality of our maintenance organization has improved."
Gains
Setting up the maintenance processes was carried out quite rapidly, according to Menno. "In a one-year period we have achieved quite a lot. In the coming months we'll be focusing on keeping the maintenance organization up-to-date." Uwe confirms that the right basis has been laid. "Now we have to make sure we keep making continuous improvements. Stork's process standardization gives us predictability and stability, and that means gains
in terms of both process performance and cost savings."