A player in the energy market had planned great investments for a power plant, yet the internal costs were not on the desired level. Together with the customer, Mantec created two sub-projects for implementing savings, which eventually brought in new processes and structure to improve competitiveness.
Background
The company is one of Europe’s leading power corporations and the Swedish branch is one of the three big players in the Swedish energy market.
At one plant, which supplies remote hot water heating for both private and commercial houses, management instituted tough requirements to reduce cost to be more competitive, in spite of very good profitability. Mantec was brought in to help.
Analysis
Because big investments were planned in the plant, a key strategic area was maintenance, both at present and in the near future. Therefore, the scope of the project was defined as improving the performance of the local maintenance department and one of the challenges was to clarify the customer supplier relationship i.e. between the maintenance department and the main supplier. This was complicated because the supplier is the outsourced operative part of the former in-house maintenance department, and in fact the supplier is also a part of the same corporation.
Implementation
The client had a very active role in the project, which was mainly driven by two sub-projects:
- customer supplier relationship; and
- warehouse and spare parts.
Each sub-project team contained a Mantec consultant and a cross-organisational internal group to get a broad base for the development and implementation of the changes, tools and improvements.
Workshops were a closely integrated part of the project and were essential to set the base for the new organisational structure and working procedures.
Results
Some of the main achievements of the project were:
- implementation of a new process from actual reported need for a maintenance action until the closed order, approved invoice and updated history file;
- putting in place a new maintenance organisation with clarified roles and responsibilities;
- instituting an improved meeting structure to support the management operating system;
- setting basic local KPIs as a part of a corporate BSC project;
- clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the warehouse; and
- setting strategy for different types of spare parts.
