The digitalisation of the maintenance function to better serve our customers
Technological progress is constantly developing within companies and modifying our daily practices. At Seqens, digitalising our various services, in part or fully, is an obvious way to achieve performance objectives and satisfy customer needs.
Improve our overall performance
The digitalisation of the maintenance function at our Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu site in Canada, which specialises in the development and manufacture of speciality ingredients for the electronics market, including photoresist low metal polymers, is part of this approach.
This initiative plays a fundamental role in this global performance research and clearly allows us to improve safety, productivity, lead-time and profitability. These points are essential in order to meet our customers’ expectations and requirements, particularly with regard to the security of their supplies.
Internally, digitalising the maintenance function helps to break down the barriers between departments thanks to centralised information that is accessible to all the people involved.
The Saint-Jean digitilisation project
Launching in March 2021, the main issues of this new project are:
- Increase maintenance productivity
- Reduce planning time for interventions
- Optimize the maintenance of the equipment fleet
- Collect maintenance data quickly and efficiently
Many elements are grouped in a specific software, available in desktop and mobile version to be easily used in the workshop. Our maintenance team members are equipped with ATEX tablets and can thus access the information of the equipment (PID, operation and maintenance manuals) at any time and in a very intuitive way. The work order documents requested by production are also quickly available.
With this software, it is possible to manage preventive tasks by programming desired triggers (day, counter or conditional trigger). This allows an optimized planning of preventive actions and instrument calibrations, whether they are carried out by the internal team or by an external service provider.
The work scheduling is easily done with the software platform by “pushing” the work into the collaborators’ schedule in a “drag and drop” manner.
The software makes it easy to filter through work orders, create customized lists and email them to the appropriate department to plan their scheduling date.
We can also easily evaluate the workload of the team based on the estimated time of each work order. This way, we have a global view of the total time for preventive maintenance, calibration and corrective work orders.
In addition, this tool, which is intended to be central, collects information at the documentation, change history and information data level.
To sum up, the digital transformation of the maintenance function at Saint-Jean accompanies our teams on a daily basis and offers them the means to be more efficient because they are now more reactive and better informed. They are directly involved in improving the competitiveness and agility of Seqens, always with a desire to offer the best to our customers.