ONE of North America’s largest agricultural fertiliser producers recognised early on that structured maintenance could have a significant, positive impact on its operational reliability and bottom line. In the 1980s, CF Industries developed a powerful maintenance planning and tracking application on IBM System/36 computers and over time migrated it to the IBM AS400 platform.
CF’s system was very effective in helping manage maintenance activities but the investment to keep this homegrown application in pace with the company’s growing business was well over $1 million. Management reasoned that migration to a Windows-based system would enable them to continue and expand their automation-driven maintenance process improvement, while providing a familiar, easy to navigate desktop environment, and a standard, Internet-enabled platform on which to build future enhancements.
CF Industries set out to find software that would deliver the maintenance planning functionality they had been enjoying in the IBM environment while providing the flexibility they needed for growth. They found it in Invensys’ enterprise asset management software system, Avantis.PRO, according to Dave Wiedenfeld, group project leader, IT, of CF Industries’ Louisiana facility.
“We found that the Avantis software had most of the functionality that we needed and also had the flexibility to develop custom applications and integration to support our business,” Wiedenfeld said.
CF Industries has now standardised on the Avantis.PRO software as its core platform for collection and storage of data on MRO inventory, procurement, and maintenance activities. They also use Avantis.DSS decision support software to analyse this data for continuous process improvement and have supplemented their system through adoption of standard catalogue descriptions and categories for all MRO items.
This system is designed to automate maintenance planning and tracking activities on nearly 50,000 asset entities, including vessels, pumps, rotating equipment, and electrical motors. It also helps manage and analyse MRO inventory and procurement on more than 60,000 inventory items in the four CF Industries manufacturing locations.
The software has optimised plant efficiency by taking data from Microsoft documents such as Excel and making useful information out of it, according to Weidenfeld.
“Data analysis that took two weeks is now done in ten minutes, which opens up new doors for improvement,” he said.
The Avantis.DSS software component has proven particularly beneficial in analysing and improving inventory and spending activities. It has contributed to reducing inventory by several million dollars by enabling CF Industries to analyse inventory activity, such as ordering frequency, number of turns, and inventory value.
Avantis.DSS software also allows CF Industries to aggregate data on spending and readily analyse factors such as number of vendors for common items, price, and delivery performance, which has contributed to savings of approximately $2 million through improved sourcing and contract negotiations.
In comparison to the investment that the company would have had to make to develop comparable functionality in house, Wiedenfeld believes the system has already paid for itself many times over.
“We installed the Avantis.DSS solution in November 2005 and it paid for itself almost immediately. It turns raw data into business intelligence and that improves our performance,” he said.
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