Efficient Plant December 2017 - 57

feature | solution focus

Opened in 2005, the Red Star Yeast Co. plant in Cedar Rapids, IA, is the largest manufacturer of fresh
yeast in North America. The operation is a joint venture of Lesaffre Yeast Corp. and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).

meant there was no way to tell who entered
information or made any changes to the
data. Users did not even initial their changes. With no way to determine who changed
what, it was also easy for an individual to accidentally overwrite vital information that,
sometimes, was years old.
Inventory tracking. Managing inventory
with an Excel spreadsheet was not efficient.
For example, when parts were needed, they
were often difficult to locate. This caused
personnel to mistakenly believe they were
out of the parts, which, in turn, led to unnecessary reorders.
Conversely, even when workers were able
to locate a part on the spreadsheet, there
wasn't really a way to know exactly where
the item was stored. In addition, since parts
weren't easily tracked, the plant would also
run out of them without being able to order
more ahead of time, leading to increased
machine downtime.

DECEMBER 2017

Work orders. Writing work orders
within an Excel spreadsheet was quite a
task. Each technician had a separate tab on
the spreadsheet, and there was also a tab for
all work orders. A supervisor would enter
necessary information for a repair in the
work-order tab, and then it would be verbally provided to a technician or added to
the individual's tab. At the end of each shift,
all technicians had to copy and paste their
work-order rows for the day and email them
out to the entire department. The supervisors for each department would then have
to go through the spreadsheet and make
sure all work orders were completed. Often,
this meant locating and speaking directly
to a technician. Going through this list and
following up with technicians consumed a
significant part of a supervisor's day.
PM tasks. Creating preventive-maintenance (PM) tasks wasn't easy, either. A
checklist was created for each asset and
then saved on a shared drive. The actual
scheduling of each PM was completely
manual, which was another time-consuming process.

SOLUTION
When senior technical buyer and CMMS
system administrator Eric Tucker joined Red
Star's team in 2007, the Cedar Rapids site had
already begun evaluating inventory-management alternatives. Tucker had worked with
computerized-maintenance-management
systems previously, so he knew that was the

way to go. After a bit of searching, in the fall
of 2008, the decision was made to purchase
a CMMS from MAPCON Technologies
(mapcon.com, Johnston, IA).

RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Once the MAPCON CMMS was implemented and all necessary data uploaded, plant
personnel noticed quite a difference in their
maintenance-work processes. The company
purchased multiple concurrent user licenses
for the software. This let several technicians
use the system at the same time-as opposed
to the former spreadsheet approach that
allowed access to only one person at a time.
Today, Red Star reports that it continues to
see benefits from the system:
Improved parts management. According to plant personnel, inventory became
easier to track with the MAPCON CMMS.
By giving users the ability to quickly search
inventory, needless purchases of duplicate
parts are a thing of the past.
Additionally, the system has an automatic
reorder setup that notifies an administrator
when the total numbers of individual parts
on hand fall below pre-determined required
minimums. Items can then be reordered immediately, thus preventing instances where
parts are needed, but not in stock.
The system also has a field where users can
enter the exact location of a part, meaning
when an item is needed, personnel don't have
to wander around the facility trying to find
it. Today, there is a computer set up at the
EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM |

http://www.mapcon.com http://www.EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Efficient Plant December 2017