Industry in survival mode

 The other finalists, Katrien Bouckaert and Peter Heyndrickx, also deserve my congratulations for the excellent work they are doing at Stora Enso.

The crisis is of course omnipresent. It weighs on just about every industrial company in our country. Falling demand and rising imports from low-wage countries are pushing our industry to the limits of profitability.  This also applies to the finalists of the Maintenance Manager of the Year award. For example, the economic activity of Stora Enso, which operates in the newsprint market, has fallen by 5% every year since 2008. In such circumstances, it is essential to include a 'survival mode' to have positive ambitions. Stora Enso's CEO, Chris De Hollander, expresses this perfectly with the quip "We want to become the last newsprint mill in Europe".

And yes, behind such a statement is also a reduction of maintenance budgets, but with a vision. Not a blind reduction in maintenance, but rather an investment in a proactive maintenance organisation. These two cases illustrate that maintenance and production reliability are key to the survival of a plant. And both Volvo Cars and Stora Enso are doing this in a relatively similar way.

Central coordination of maintenance seems to be of major importance. In both companies, maintenance has been decentralised for some years. When the maintenance practices in the different departments grew too separate from each other, and there were too many breakdowns and too high maintenance costs, it was decided to recreate a new centrally coordinated service centre. At Volvo, however, only the technicians working in the local production departments remain. In both cases, a start has been made on describing the maintenance processes well, with a focus on improving maintenance productivity and increasing the reliability and availability of the production lines by applying best practices, but at a reasonable cost of course.

Together with the increase in reliability, reactive failure maintenance is reduced. This results in lower maintenance costs. Our finalists prove this with excellent results in internal benchmarks.

In addition to the budgetary pressure, there is still a big challenge for our maintenance departments in the light of the current crisis: how to deal with old installations. With a few exceptions, such as the recently announced investment in the Total refinery in Antwerp, there is indeed less and less budget to replace existing installations. The real survival issue for our industry in the coming years is therefore to continue to compete with an ageing fleet of machines.

Wim Vancauwenberghe

Maintenance Evangelist