Fruytier Group can rely on reliable data to develop an effective preventive maintenance strategy
Fruytier Group (a top 20 European softwood sawmilling group) is a 700-person family company operating in Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg. The group specializes in working with wood and softwoods and manages material processing end-to-end with a “zero waste” strategy that recovers everything up to pellet production and green electricity generation. Its leader, Pierre Fruytier, drove its industrialization by building cutting, sawing, drying, planing and glued-laminated timber units. Each country has a sawing and drying unit. Planing mills are located in Germany and Belgium, and pellet units in Belgium and France. The glued-laminated timber unit in Belgium produces beams for storage halls and complete architectural elements with spans up to 41 metres. For Timothée De Greift, production manager in charge of the sawing sites, planing mills and transport, machines are at the heart of the production process and run continuously at full speed to ensure profitability. They require heavy investment, so it is crucial to preserve their service life as long as possible. Maintenance is one of the cornerstones of the production process and required implementing a performant CMMS.
A CMMS to collect data
Each site hosts a substantial maintenance department with its own practices. It was necessary to industrialize and standardize processes that until then existed on paper or in Excel. This initiative was led by Lucien Adam, head of mechanical maintenance at the pilot sawmill, and Vincent Saiselet, site manager. Timothée De Greift wanted a scalable, corporate solution that could be deployed across multiple sites to share information from one site to another, in particular data on asset parts and their associated history.
DimoMaint MX met all the requirements
A benchmark of existing solutions on the market was carried out in 2023 by Lucien Adam. He appreciated the ergonomics and ease of use of the mobile app, the web platform, the responsiveness of support and the overall scalability. Vincent Saiselet notes that they were able to see the solution in use on site at a company in another sector in Belgium that masters the tool perfectly and is very satisfied with its relationship with DimoMaint.
A solution endorsed by experienced technicians
Maintenance is divided into two teams (mechanical and electrical), each comprising 3 to 4 people. The pilot site in Vivy (around 40 people) is entirely dedicated to sawing all special sizes in terms of diameters and wood lengths to meet specific markets in Belgium and the Netherlands, notably for outdoor landscaping. Vivy implemented DimoMaint at the initiative of Vincent Saiselet and Lucien Adam. Their ambition is to roll out the solution to the other sites, starting with France.
For Timothée De Greift, “Lucien and Vincent carried out the due diligence with commitment and enthusiasm, two key success factors. They drove the adoption of the solution and will be ambassadors for the other teams. Without buy-in to the tool, data cannot be reported correctly. It is therefore vital to have motivated champions at the initiative of the project.” Lucien Adam confirms that the need to simplify time management and the information flow also came from several mechanics who wanted their working methods to be assessed.
A POC and very responsive DimoMaint support
For Vincent, the POC went very well thanks to the professionalism of the DimoMaint staff – particularly for creating the tree structure – who fully understood Fruytier’s needs and working methods. The setup was carried out very quickly and teams were ready to use the solution after two weeks! “All technicians use the MX version. We were pleasantly surprised because the most experienced technicians adopted the technology with the most enthusiasm. This is evident in the time tracking and the follow-up of work orders.”
A major project goal: centralizing information
As the process lead, Vincent Saiselet wanted to collect and centralize maintenance-related information. “In the past, technicians’ work was certainly formalized, but tasks were carried out day-to-day without a real overview, let alone being properly digitized. We wanted to unify service activities, for example for scheduling or data analysis to make strategic decisions based on detailed knowledge of the assets. These assets require heavy investment and we must preserve their service life as long as possible. Maintenance is therefore one of the cornerstones of the production process and we wanted to make it even more efficient and effective. DimoMaint MX allows us to consider a significant margin for improvement.”
A redesign of operational processes
With working hours running from 5:30 to 14:00, maintenance can take place after that window and the solution allows full use of schedules, efficiently replacing paper and phone. According to Vincent Saiselet: “DimoMaint MX makes us reconsider our way of working. Currently, we manage reactive maintenance daily across two sawing lines running 8.5 hours per day in parallel. It is necessary to develop preventive maintenance to avoid this constant firefighting. DimoMaint MX offers analysis tools that will allow us to adapt our operating mode to meet the requirements set by management. Gathering the first data will give us the perspective needed to implement the best strategy supported by hard figures.”
Features usable by all staff
For Lucien Adam, the fact that information can be reported by anyone in the plant is very interesting: “The requester profile is convenient because I can grant access to any user who wants the solution on their mobile phone. I can also consult all the information submitted and analyse it against the tree structure.” Work requests are centralized and then assigned to mechanics and electricians. When work orders are created by mechanics or electricians, the work orders are closed by the team leader. Any work request initiated by Vincent Saiselet or coming from a manager outside the mechanical and electrical departments is validated by them, because repairs must be carried out according to their own criteria.
In addition, dashboard analysis makes it possible to distribute monthly reports to technicians with KPIs such as the monthly cost of interventions in hours and parts, the ratio of clocked time vs time logged in the CMMS, the number of interventions with average time. “It’s a complete change of operating mode, because we had no baseline indicators,” concludes Timothée De Greift.
Promising future prospects within the group
Timothée De Greift plans to deploy the solution in France, where the reception has been good because the rollout announcement was well prepared in advance. The German site must first enter its spare parts store into the ERP. In addition, Timothée says he has received information requests from other functions within the group, which is promising for the solution’s future.
He hopes to manage stocks soon now that data is accumulating: “Purchasing is done via the ERP, but stocks are loaded via the CMMS so they can be consumed in the application by maintenance operators. Consumptions will be sent back to store managers who will enter them into the ERP.” Vincent Saiselet adds: “It is vital that our operators know stock levels at the time of an intervention, as well as location. Finally, the information must reach the stores.” Another step will be to look at interfacing with the BI system to implement MTBF tracking.
