A results-driven, reliable maintenance operation. This was what chemical giant Hexion requested of Stork Technical Services in the fall of 2008.

“The operation processes in our maintenance organization weren’t running smoothly and efficiently,” said Uwe Neuman, Technical Production Leader at Hexion, located in Duisburg. “I’m glad we hired Stork to help us by dispatching an interim maintenance engineer/coach maintenance manager to our site in Germany.”

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 Stork’s asset management methods and maintenance best practices from his experiences in the “chemical city” of Duisburg.

"Together, Uwe and 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,” said Menno. “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 for maintenance excellence, but also the ability to put concepts into action. "Stork gave us the advice we needed to implement a fresh maintenance strategy,” he said. “And they also took care of the implementation. Thanks to the application of their best practices, we have been able to improve our maintenance performance and make the required changes where necessary. All in all, the quality of our maintenance organization has improved."

Gains
Setting up the maintenance processes was an efficient effort, according to Menno. "We have achieved quite a lot in a one year period. In the coming months we'll be focusing on keeping the maintenance organization up-to-date,” he said. 
Uwe confirms that the right foundation 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."