Concerns
Tekniplex has been on a fast track for growth over the past several years, and keeping track of work orders, parts and assets at a growing number of plants is challenging. The company’s realization that it needed an enterprise-level solution serendipitously coincided with Brightly’s introduction of Asset Essentials.
Several years ago, a recently acquired plant in Ohio needed a CMMS and Tekniplex was in the process of onboarding Maintenance Dude, a classic Brightly product, just for that one plant. Jim Welsh, the company’s manager of manufacturing engineering, was on site when Brightly representatives visited. From them, he learned about the rollout of Asset Essentials just as corporate leaders mentioned to him that they’d like to find an enterprise-level solution for manufacturing management.
“We had a bunch of plants with different systems and we needed to consolidate,” Welsh says.
The Approach
Because Tekniplex had experience using Maintenance Dude, it was easy to embrace the more robust Asset Essentials. The company used internal consultants to manage the rollout of the software to all its facilities in 2018, and “transferring data was seamless,” Welsh says.
We use it to consolidate legacy systems into a singular system, so we can use it to better support our maintenance activities. We like it because we can take it to a plant and easily configure it for that plant.
Jim Welsh
Manager of Manufacturing Engineering, Tekniplex
The Results
As the company has continued to grow through acquisitions, Asset Essentials has been a fundamental tool for getting new facilities on board quickly. “We use it to consolidate legacy systems into a singular system, so we can use it to better support our maintenance activities,” Welsh says. “We like it because we can take it to a plant and easily configure it for that plant. We don’t have to change the way they do maintenance; we can configure the solution for each plant in the way they already operate.”
All Tekniplex facilities use Asset Essentials to manage workflows, including work orders and PMs. Some use the solution to also manage parts. Welsh also uses Asset Essentials to manage all company assets and administrative functions such as programs and audits.
With the Asset Essentials documents library, Tekniplex is able to upload and archive the digital manuals for every new piece of equipment. As a result, manuals are always available to techs whenever they are needed, and techs can easily access these documents using the AE mobile app on their tablets.
In addition to using Asset Essentials for work order management and other standard tasks, Tekniplex has also manipulated the system to support other specific use cases. For example, after acquiring three new plants that needed a system to handle calibration, Welsh carved out a section of Asset Essentials to handle that task. Using this customized solution he calls “Measure and Monitor,” the company is now managing calibration programs in eight plants using Asset Essentials instead of using a separate calibration solution.
“Running Checks” is another homegrown, customized solution that Tekniplex has developed using Asset Essentials. Once a week, a maintenance technician with a portable vibration monitor walks the equipment while it’s running. The technician takes vibration and temperature readings, as well as other measurements at various points. All this data is built into a PM in Asset Essentials. Tekniplex collects these readings in the software and using a connector tool, pulls them out into another program that trends the readings.
“I can get trended information on asset health, and we’ve been able to detect some potential failures ahead of time that would have been catastrophic,” Welsh says.
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