Prepackaged integration solution becomes change agent for chemical manufacturer
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
When Salt Lake City-based petrochemical manufacturer Huntsman asked a consulting firm to analyze maintenance operations at its Rozenburg facility in The Netherlands, the challenges were evident. The inability to coordinate planning and scheduling across the facility's six plants was driving costs up, and productivity down.
Faced with these challenges, Huntsman set two goals for Rozenburg: improve workforce productivity by at least 10 percent, and reduce overall planning and coordination personnel by 15 percent. Achieving those goals would require new business processes, but Huntsman management also realized even new business processes would not be effective if they weren't supported by the right IT infrastructure.
For Huntsman, a $15-billion-a-year company with more than 11,000 employees and operations in 22 countries, creating the right infrastructure meant integrating the plant maintenance module of its SAP ERP suite with its project-management application—P3e (Project Planner for the Enterprise) from Primavera.
We wanted to make sure that all the different plants—and all of our contractors—would use one planning platform, says Peter Spiegelenberg, manager of the planning and contracting team at Rozenburg. So we wanted to integrate SAP and Primavera.
Its not unusual for an SAP integration project to involve extensive custom coding, but Huntsman sidestepped that potential hurdle by deploying a packaged application integration solution from Impress Software. This solutionI—mpress for EPM—was built specifically for linking maintenance-management and project-management applications. Both SAP and Primavera have certified Impress for EPM as being compatible with those respective applications, making it an ideal choice for Huntsman's integration project.
Spiegelenberg says smooth links forged by Impress were integral to helping Huntsman complete a total change program.
Before this initiative, the six plants at Huntsman's Rozenburg facility planned and scheduled maintenance events separately. Resources—including 61 Huntsman employees and five contractors that make up the Maintenance and Construction Group—were allocated according to peak demand. This led to significant inefficiencies and extremely high overhead, with maintenance workers often waiting long hours for assignments due to the lack of communication between plants and departments.
With Impress for EPM linking the SAP and Primavera packages, maintenance and construction activities at all six plants are managed from a central location. Data flowing between the Primavera project-management package and the SAP plant-maintenance system is constantly synchronized via predefined data mappings, pre-built business processes, and highly tuned access components for reading and writing to the specific systems' APIs. All of these integration and messaging components are part of the Impress for EPM solution.
Huntsman's total change program included the formation of a new Planning and Contracting team, whose members access the Primavera user interface to review work orders that are entered into SAP by maintenance teams at the various plants. The team then distributes tasks and allocates the appropriate resources for each job. That information is entered into Primavera, and information about completed jobs is automatically updated in SAP, where it is accessible for reporting and future planning.
The project met its goals, reducing planning and maintenance personnel by 15 percent, and saving 450 man-hours per week.
Having a centralized maintenance planning tool with a robust interface to SAP PM to schedule our internal personnel as well as contractors is a key element in achieving the anticipated savings in maintenance operations, says Roland la Rivière, maintenance area team leader for Huntsman.
While it's hard to say which benefits are due specifically to the software tools, Spiegelenberg attributes the savings of two FTE (full-time-equivalent) in planning personnel to the Impress solution.
A fully automated integration maximizes resource leveling and productivity, he concludes. We reduced our overall planning and coordination personnel from 65 to less than 56 employees.
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