Crown Holdings, Inc. is a leading supplier of packaging products to consumer marketing companies around the world. With $6.8 billion in annual sales, its global operations—spanning 192 plants located in 45 countries—supply rigid packaging for a broad range of aerosol, beverage, food, and health & beauty products. Crown selected eMaint CMMS online solutions as the technology core supporting their corporate EAM/CMMS cost reduction initiatives.

In 2001, Crown’s U.S. Beverage Division sought a more economical solution for effectively managing maintenance activities and reducing repair parts inventory. Total Cost of Ownership for their existing MP2 system had grown to such a degree that, combined with budget constraints, it reduced available licensing and made the system less than effective for a high volume production facility. Crown’s vision was to elevate their preventive maintenance activities to a predictive capability, with real-time data ties from the Shop Floor SCADA systems. This automated notification system would use equipment usage and cycle counts to initiate pro-active maintenance activities, plus reduce or extend maintenance schedules for low utilization equipment and machinery.

In fall 2001, Crown began its pilot of eMaint CMMS at two plant locations. Each plant was up and running on eMaint within a week, with data successfully imported into the system. In a collaborative vendor/client partnership, eMaint worked closely with Crown personnel at the plant and corporate levels to enhance the system to match Crown’s business processes. The success of the two-plant pilot led to a full rollout of eMaint across all plants in the U.S. Beverage Division through 2002, and implementation across all U.S. Food Division plants in 2003.

In addition to the individual plant systems, eMaint provides enterprise-wide consolidation of the data from the plant accounts to enable easy data analysis across the divisions. Since implementing eMaint in 2001, Crown Cork & Seal has expanded its use of eMaint to over 45 locations across four divisions in the U.S., Cambodia, Canada, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Vietnam.

Crown has an enterprise-wide solution for its plants that requires no capital requests and no internal IS support, hosted 100% by eMaint. The system is easy for average users to navigate and is so cost- effective that Crown has increased licenses from only one to an average of 5 users per plant for optimum coverage, increasing maintenance effectiveness and Return on Assets while still reducing costs. Crown found in eMaint CMMS an EAM/CMMS solution that supports its continuous improvement process and contributes to its quality maintenance operations and Six Sigma goals. Service operations were optimized even more by reducing disparate systems and communizing systems across plants.

Tom F., Senior Project Manager, Crown Cork & Seal, Inc.