Rockwood Pigments moves to paper-free maintenance

Rockwood Pigments’ manufacturing site at Kidsgrove, Stoke-on-Trent, is on its way to saying goodbye to its outdated paper based maintenance operation.

The company manufactures and processes liquid, powder, and granulated forms of iron oxide colour pigments, as well as supplying a range of natural and synthetic inorganic pigments and automated pigment-handling systems.

Historically the Stoke site relied on hand written requests and a spreadsheet for work orders and requisitions that were passed to the engineers, making it near impossible to keep an accurate record of all the maintenance work taking place around the site.

This caused frequent discrepancies, meaning that response to breakdown was often delayed and sometimes even missed. So Rockwood Pigments IT manager, Jonathan Ellis and engineering team leader Peter Richardson set about looking for a solution.

Disaster stuck in 2007 when Rockwood Pigments’ Kidsgrove site was flooded, destroying many important calibration reports, service records, manuals and other crucial documents, as well as records for both the running of the site and quality and environmental audits.

This proved the critical factor in the company’s resolve to better protect their assets and backup their maintenance data. The first step was to invest in the plant, improve planning, and move from a reactive to a preventive approach to maintenance.

Demonstrating regulatory compliance was also a key driver for purchasing a CMMS due to the pressure from both internal and external auditors to show evidence come audit time.

“We could provide records and most of the evidence needed for the auditors, but finding it quickly was proving difficult; We needed to be able to prove times and dates on maintenance works, so we had to commit to a better way of working in the form of MMS software,” said Richardson.

Having chosen to implement the Idhammar MMS, it was a chance for a brand new start, so Rockwood set about adding data to the system whilst cleansing existing records.

“The data input process provided the perfect opportunity to clean up our records; we had around 3000 suppliers on record, half of which were out of date and several listed for machines we didn’t even use anymore. It was the same with the engineering spares,” the engineering team leader explained.

With their data in order Rockwood Pigments realised other benefits of the software including a clearer more organised approach to maintenance. This allowed the scheduling and classification of its maintenance – preventative or breakdown, new installation or inspection, condition monitoring etc.

The company also took the opportunity to set up planned preventative maintenance tasks; enabling auto inspection and reporting on a number of critical items. Also, the software’s reporting and analysis tools enabled process controllers to cross check data and report on the findings.

Despite an initial concern from the engineering team that the software was put in place as a time and motion study, it soon became clear that the software helped to demonstrate the value of the team; including hours worked and jobs completed.

The Idhammar MMS has been a great success, allowing Rockwood Pigments to be more cost and time efficient; maximising asset performance whilst reducing overall downtime.

Concerns about regulatory compliance are also a thing of the past due to the central data repository which stores permits to work, health and safety certificates and service history records which are assigned to each asset.

Richardson remarks: “I’m now confident that I can produce the correct maintenance documentation quickly and easily and demonstrate the professional running of the department.”

Based on the progress the maintenance team was making and the performance of the CMMS, early in 2011 Rockwood Pigments chose to upgrade its Idhammar MMS sofware to the latest version in order to benefit from new features and functionality.

IT manager Ellis said: “When working with Idhammar Systems, software migrations and upgrades are smooth. It’s the way system implementations should be - swift and hassle free.”

In relation to the latest version, Richardson commented: “There are still many valuable features of the software which we will be using in the future, but for now, it does everything we wanted it to and more.

“Implementing the Idhammar MMS was definitely a move in the right direction to more efficient operations. There are still many valuable features of the software which we will be using in the future, but for now, it does everything we wanted it to and more.”