How Kopparbergs made maintenance profitable

The long-term maintenance plan exceeded expectations. The result: greatly improved productivity and lower maintenance costs. Equipment uptime is now at 94%!
– An outcome that we could not have hoped for, with the best will in the world, says Jimmy Öberg, technology manager at the Kopparbergs Brewery.

Last year, Sweden’s national maintenance association, Svenskt Underhåll, named Jimmy Öberg Maintenance Manager of the Year at the Maintenance Fair in Gothenburg. The award is based on the outstanding results achieved by Kopparbergs since the initiative started five years ago.
– The vision was to achieve world-class standards of production. But to get there we had to create maintenance with full control, says Jimmy Öberg.
With this starting point, an action plan was created that would lead to smarter and more permissions-based maintenance with high precision.
– I think it is very important to define where you want to get to. To be able to follow up and measure the outcomes. We have benefited from this all the way.
– We invested in API-pro, a maintenance system with which we can report and extract key facts and figures. This has played a major role in our success.
When we started this investment in 2012, unwanted production shut-downs were common. Equipment uptime was at 50%. Since then, it has almost doubled: last year it was at 94%.

With the new follow-up system RS-production you can encode all stops.
– Previously, our entire organisation was based on solving urgent problems. You put two and two together and ran to fix things. There were no resources invested in finding out why it happened, Jimmy recalls.
With the changed approach you get to the bottom of things. Using root cause analyses, you learn what happened – and make sure it doesn’t happen again. To put it simply, you build the problems out of the equipment.
– We could then also make more and more time available for both production and maintenance. It also meant that we could increase the degree of insourcing. We took tasks in-house that were previously handled by third parties.
– The added value was that we were able to build our knowledge and experience internally, which is now being used for day-to-day preventive work. Today, we are working much more closely with production and operations. With good results.

Jimmy Öberg gives an example that speaks volumes:
– We have a filling machine that previously needed a week every year for renovation. Now we have optimised maintenance in such a way that we only have to do the shut-down every two years, which means a saving of SEK 800,000 / year. A CRT (Cost Reduction Tracker) model is used to measure repairs, evaluating all the savings and efficiency improvements.
– The trend is for a steady decline in our maintenance costs. In 2018 we came in under budget, says Jimmy. Increasing digitalisation is contributing to success. Jimmy is convinced that this is the right way to go – and is alert to all new developments.
– That’s why visiting Underhållsmässan, the Maintenance Show, is a given for us at Kopparbergs. We get both inspiration and ideas there, he says.
– In 2020, I believe there will be even greater focus on smart maintenance, systems-based solutions for IoT and measuring equipment embedded in equipment. So it is becoming even clearer how digital technology can really facilitate the entire maintenance organisation.

Underhållsmässan takes place in Gothenburg on 10-13 March 2020.
For more information visit en.underhall.se.