CMMS for food processing maintenance – Example of Malteurop

Food CMMS: CARL Source’s advantage for Malteurop maintenance.

Malteurop has made CMMS and mobility a real strategic asset to optimize maintenance work. The world leader in malt production relies on a very large territorial network with several sites based in different countries and regions. Enough to require a deep reorganization with, as a result, the migration to a Food CMMS flexible and adapted to the needs of this industry.

Decoding with collaborators Malteurop Caroline Pattyn-Froissart, information flow manager, Xavier Niquet, preventive maintenance coordinator, and Michael Chotin, technical manager.

Malteurop, one of the world leaders in malt production for the food industry

Malteurop supplies more than 600 brewers and more than 600 distilleries from its 24 sites worldwide. The company also produces malt-based ingredients for the food industry. The France-Germany Business Unit, the oldest in the group, has 4 sites in France and 3 in Germany.

In 2019, the construction of a new building specially designed and scaled for all these maintenance activities, be they mechanical, hydraulic or for automation and boiler making, has allowed both better accessibility to its customers and improved intervention efficiency by its technicians.

A pilot project to drive change and a deployment in three stages

“The CMMS is a global project”, asks Caroline Pattyn-Froissart, head of information flows at Malteurop. “There is what we do before setting up the CMMS around maintenance, what we do in CMMS, and what we plan to do after its deployment.” The project team took the time to ask the right questions and to carry out an audit in all the 7 sites of the Business Unit France Germany for which linguistic and cultural differences represent a constraint to be taken into account from the start of the project.

“It all started with an observation,” says Xavier Niquet, Malteurop preventive maintenance coordinator. “For us, maintenance is a critical pillar. Our sites are highly automated and we cannot afford to have multiple outages simultaneously. This would have a major impact on our production. And the issue of safety was paramount. On all the 7 sites of the France Germany BU, half of the accidents result from maintenance work.”

The steering committee of the transition project to CMMS software CARL Source was able to set these objectives:

Improve the safety of employees by implementing maintenance methods.

Reduce corrective maintenance and rebalance the ratio between preventive and corrective interventions.

Improve the availability of machines to produce more without necessarily incurring additional investments in the production tool.

Optimize maintenance costs.

To improve budget management and forecasting. Since machines are the same in the different sites, it is possible to establish the budgets according to the activities and the regular breakdowns for each of them.

Malting – Malteurop

The Core Model and Maintenance activities

The team has built a reproducible core model to be able to deploy it on all the sites. “This phase of creating a core model represents 80% of the work,” specifies Caroline Pattyn-Froissart. “The remaining 20% is for setup.” Dashboards with reporting on safety, maintenance activities as well as impact on production and costs complete the tools of this transition.

“…Today, jobs are automatically uploaded to the CARL Source CMMS software and we can allocate them to technicians according to their availability.”

Malteurop technical manager

CARL Source, an agri-food CMMS solution that adapts to the specificities of Malteurop maintenance

Before choosing the equipment management and maintenance software adapted to Malteurop’s needs, the project team also carried out an audit of several of its suppliers. This is the option mobile CARL Touch which convinced the team thanks to the possibility of working asynchronously, that is to say offline. “We work in silos, with very thick walls, so the wifi is not always available. And our technicians still loved having their smartphones to integrate the data from the work”, explains the information flow manager. In addition, the solution is multilingual, which is essential for a company such as Malteurop with international BUs (China, United States, etc.). Support by the CARL Berger-Levrault teams was also provided in several languages, which facilitated internal work.

“On our sites, everyone who has access to a computer, i.e. administrative, finance or production colleagues, uses CARL Source, while our technicians are equipped with smartphones with CARL Touch mobile solution“, says Michael Chotin, Malteurop technical manager. Among the many strengths identified, it emphasizes preventive plans. “We took our old Excel tables and uploaded them into this new tool. Today, the work tasks come out automatically on the software and we can assign them to the technicians according to their availability too”, concluded the technical manager.
In order to train all employees to use CARL applications, Malteurop organized training and a seminar in French and German. This also made it possible to better understand the specificities of the teams and to set up an effective follow-up to support the change.

Scope for implementation

“We are now in stage three“, analyzes Xavier Niquet. “We can use data to boost our continuous improvement. “And there are still plenty of ideas to be exploited,” adds Caroline Pattyn-Froissart, “particularly on security. Technicians ask us for even more, just like modules on stocks for example”. Mission to follow.

THE ADVANTAGES OF AGRI-FOOD CMMS WITH CARL SOURCE AND CARL TOUCH

Possibility to work asynchronously Automation of preventive plans Multilingual

Would you like more information about our CARL Source Factory Food CMMS solution?