Hain Celestial Mountville Facility Achieves 75% Critical Work Order Completion Rate with eMaint
Customer Since: 2017 | Industry: Food & Beverage
See how Hain Celestial Mountville Facility uses eMaint to achieve a 75% PM completion rate and improve asset management, leading to greater productivity and lower costs.
Summary
For Hain Celestial, a pioneer in organic and natural products, the journey towards operational excellence is powered by eMaint CMMS. At their facility in Mountville, Pennsylvania, this commitment to excellence has resulted in a remarkable 75% completion rate on both Preventive Maintenance (PM) and critical work orders, a significant milestone in their asset management strategy. Hain Celestial uses eMaint to
- Achieve a 75% PM and critical work order completion rate
- Track asset health and reliability
- Improve scheduling to maximize maintenance efficiency
- Track and update work orders from the floor using Fluke Mobile
BACKGROUND
The Hain Celestial Group, Inc. is a leading manufacturer of organic and natural products. Their iconic products include Earth’s Best yogurts and the Celestial Seasonings line of herbal teas. They also produce a range of popular better-for-you snacks, like Veggie Straws and Terra Chips.
The Hain Celestial plant in Mountville, Pennsylvania, has been using eMaint for five years now. Recently, Steven Bear, the plant’s maintenance reliability planner, decided to step up their eMaint implementation to make full use of the software’s capabilities.
Bear wanted to track work order completion rates, especially for critical assets. He also wanted to track equipment reliability and parts usage. His overarching goals include reducing downtime, improving asset management, and lowering maintenance costs.
CHALLENGES
The facility in Mountville, Pennsylvania, manufactures Veggie Straws and Terra Chips. This plant has over 1,500 assets, including scales, conveyors, fryers, potato slicers, and bagging machines. At any given time, there are 1,700 PMs in the system, as well as hundreds of reactive work orders.
The maintenance team has limited time to carry out their work, and production in the facility sometimes goes into the weekends. Crews also sanitize the plant on the weekends, which means maintenance crews must work around both production and sanitation schedules.
In other words, every minute counts.
IMPLEMENTATION
Bear joined Hain Celestial two years ago. At the time, the team was already using eMaint, but Bear was unfamiliar with the CMMS. So he signed up for one of eMaint’s online boot camp training sessions. He described the system as “easy to learn” and said he wanted to take advantage of eMaint’s full capabilities.
Specifically, Bear desired to use eMaint CMMS for:
PM Optimization
Bear and his team used eMaint to optimize all their existing PMs. eMaint makes it easy to classify and determine which PMs are important and which are less essential. This helps the maintenance team make the best possible use of their limited time and resources.
Today, the Mountville, Pennsylvania facility has achieved a more than 75% completion rate on all of its PMs. It has also reached a more than 75% critical work order completion rate, which means its most critical assets stay up and running much longer.
Work Order Tracking
The Mountville facility juggles hundreds of reactive maintenance jobs every day. To improve its asset management, the team turned to eMaint’s work tracking capabilities. According to Bear, using the mobile app has made it incredibly easy to track and update work orders.
“Our technicians use the mobile app, which makes it very, very simple out on the floor. Most of the techs use their iPads, and some of them use their phones,” Bear said. “All the information is at their fingertips. And they can also access their email on the iPad. So, if there’s any communication needed, we communicate right there.”
The technicians also often take pictures with their iPads and add them to the work orders to provide additional information. Having visuals makes it much easier to share information and updates, Bear explained. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
RESULTS
Thanks to their expanded use of eMaint, Hain Celestial’s Mountville facility saw a dramatic increase in PM completion rates, achieving a 75% overall PM completion rate. They also now have a greater than 75% critical work order completion rate.
eMaint has also allowed for accurate tracking of KPIs and has made it easier to share that data with the company’s decision-makers.
“eMaint has been very helpful to get us to our KPI point and record all the information that’s requested from corporate,” Bear said.
The Hain Celestial company was so impressed with Bear’s results that they started implementing eMaint in more of their locations. And today, most of Hain Celestial’s sites are using eMaint X4. (Bear recently traveled to Toronto to help that plant implement eMaint, too.)
Next steps
Bear’s next goal is to further improve tracking of reactive maintenance tasks. To do this, he’s recently started having his technicians put in work orders for all their calls. With the mobile app, this should be easy to implement. Having that extra data will help Bear and his team improve asset management, better track KPIs, and ensure that maintenance crews are making the best possible use of their time.
The plant is also planning to start tracking downtime hours, which will help them control costs, improve asset management, and optimize PMs.
Moving forward, Bear says he’s looking forward to seeing what more eMaint can do to track downtime, optimize PMs, and improve asset management throughout his plant.