How they streamlined plant maintenance systems and increased work capacity utilization

Challenge

Hemlock Semiconductor faced many challenges coordinating plant maintenance work at their Michigan site due to a complicated SAP system and archaic HR reporting. With little to no time available to schedule preventative maintenance, planners were overwhelmed with corrective maintenance scheduling and rescheduling. Hemlock’s key challenges consisted of: 

• Importing data in and out of their ERP system led to corruption
• Process efficiency needed to be improved, and operational costs were too high
• HR and maintenance data were separate, leading to difficulties in planning and scheduling  

Solutions

Hemlock implemented Prometheus Planning & Scheduling to help make their SAP systems more user-friendly and eliminate planning and scheduling process inefficiencies. They decided to: 

• Integrate the HR module across the plant maintenance work centers.
• Centralize access to key plant maintenance data and trend information at the corporate level to give executives greater insight into the company’s overall operations.  
• Increase reliability of equipment and ensure a safe plant environment by allowing planners and schedulers to focus on the science of planning and scheduling.
• Achieve plant maintenance initiatives such as fully utilizing capacity, improving data integrity, and eliminating sources of user error. 

Results

Prometheus Group’s software solution has enabled Hemlock Semiconductor to respond rapidly to break-in maintenance work and allowed for an increase in preventative maintenance to be scheduled. They also: 

• Increased productivity by 30%
• Allowed for 20 hours of weekly preventative maintenance  
• Achieved 80% maintenance capacity across all work centers  
• Saw a 30% decrease in non-value-added activities