eMaint > Case Studies > HEXPOL Compounding Americas' Standardized Maintenance and Reduced Downtime with eMaint

HEXPOL Compounding Americas' Standardized Maintenance and Reduced Downtime with eMaint

Technology Category

Functional Applications - Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS)
Functional Applications - Inventory Management Systems

Applicable Industries

Aerospace
Automotive

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Warehouse & Inventory Management

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Predictive Maintenance

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

HEXPOL Compounding Americas (HCA) is a custom rubber manufacturer headquartered in Malmö, Sweden, with 16 locations throughout the U.S. and Mexico. HCA manufactures rubber compounds used for parts in the automotive industry, including seals, tires, and hoses, along with a wide range of other industries and applications from aerospace to consumer items. The company uses various methods and materials to customize compounds durable enough to withstand the harshest of conditions. HCA has over 50 manufacturing lines throughout its entire North America portfolio. The company caters to both large bulk orders and small orders, depending on the customer’s needs.

The Challenge

HEXPOL Compounding Americas (HCA), a custom rubber manufacturer with 16 locations throughout the U.S. and Mexico, faced a significant challenge in standardizing their maintenance and operations across all sites. The company's rapid growth, partly through acquisitions, made standardization a top priority. The sites, while decentralized, needed to coordinate among themselves. The company sought a solution that would allow them to implement preventive and predictive maintenance standards to meet the exact requirements of the automotive industry. They also needed a system that could help them standardize their maintenance operations, send weekly and monthly reports to the Managing Director of each site, and implement audits to ensure each site is following best practices.

The Solution

HCA implemented eMaint, a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), to standardize their maintenance and operations across all sites. The CMMS allowed HCA to roll out standards and make changes quickly across their 16 sites. The reports feature in eMaint was used to automatically send weekly and monthly reports to the Managing Director of each site. Audits were implemented to ensure each site was following best practices for using eMaint. The implementation of eMaint involved a considerable amount of planning and preparation, which ultimately helped HCA gain more visibility and clarity across the organization. The CMMS also helped measure the KPIs that would add the most value and identify processes that could be improved. The parent-child asset hierarchy within eMaint allowed HCA to pinpoint the assets causing the root problem and build additional preventive actions around those assets.

Operational Impact

The standardization efforts with eMaint have had numerous benefits for HCA. In addition to providing greater visibility into the operations, HCA can now extract valuable insights into what is happening across its 16 sites, why it’s happening, and how it can be resolved. The system allows for best practices on preventive maintenance activities so the company does not have to reinvent the wheel every time. By learning from failures when they occur and applying the relevant solutions when similar problems arise again, HCA has increased efficiency, saved time and costs, and reduced downtime. eMaint also streamlined inventory management across multiple sites, saving time, money, and resources. Furthermore, HCA was able to integrate eMaint with SAP for their purchase order management, ensuring that different business areas can work together effectively and have the current and most up‑to‑date information.