DAFSmarter planned maintenance leads to 27% increase in production

The task
The Belgian factory, responsible for the production of truck cabs, encountered problems in increasing production capacity. In this factory the cabins are assembled, painted in the right colour and equipped according to the customer’s wishes. For DAF Trucks it was necessary to increase productivity to meet the increasing demand. Then was decided to introduce the Maintenance Excellence programme.

The approach
In previous projects, the production speed of the paint shop had already been increased to the maximum technically feasible level. The only way to increase the production speed was to generate extra production time at the weekend by reducing the 48-hour cleaning and maintenance stop.

The reduction from 48 hours to 16 hours was achieved in several steps. The first phase, reducing the number of hours from 48 to 24, was fairly easy to complete, i.a. by adding personnel. A detailed analysis was made to gain insight into all the work which must be executed during the stop, work instructions were written for each task and the maintenance and cleaning activities were better coordinated. This required necessary consultation with contractors, who were used to plan the work themselves.

The next step, from 24 to 16 hours, was a bigger challenge.  A weekly planning meeting was introduced to further improve communication with the contractors, to estimate more accurately the time needed for the tasks to be performed and to optimise the sequence of tasks to be performed. Maintenance work and inspections were also carried out more efficiently. A planning system for all work (including contractors’ tasks) was introduced. This made clear which resources were needed in which part of the fabric and for how long. For each part of the production line, all activities were grouped and coordinated to stay within the 16-hour time limit.

After all tasks were stored in the SAP EAM system, the new work process was extensively tested. At this point it became clear that especially the new role of the “Planner/Gatekeeper” and his decision-making authority were crucial. A “shutdown dashboard” was implemented so that all resources could indicate when their work was finished. This way it became possible to easily monitor the progress of the stop and anticipate any delays.

Added value Mainnovation
One of the successes of this project was to reduce the shutdown time of the weekly cleaning stop in the cabin plant from 48 to 16 hours by smarter planned maintenance, resulting in a production increase of 27% or 15,000 extra trucks per year.

A reduction from 48 to 16 hours through smarter planned maintenance, resulting in a 27% increase in production or 15,000 extra trucks per year