The Bangkok-based world-leading manufacturer of engineered steel and fibre-reinforced polymer construction products implements an innovative asset management strategy
The Dextra Group (1,000 employees worldwide), established in Bangkok in 1983 by French entrepreneurs, now boasts revenues exceeding $160 million. Dextra operates on all continents, serving the needs of 55 market areas through 20,000 projects and a network of 90 distribution partners. Their business lines specialize in concrete reinforcement, bat systems, ground engineering as well as plumbing and piping. They develop engineering projects in numerous sectors, including airports, bridges, buildings, metros and tunnels, nuclear plants, ports, oil & gas and stadia. With manufacturing plants in three locations (China, India and Thailand), and 1,600 pieces of equipment around the world the Maintenance and After Sales services required a robust CMMS system.
A worldwide scope for maintenance projects
Christophe Regad, Chief Operations Officer, explains that each manufacturing plant has its own production equipment and maintenance department. We have also 1,600 pieces of equipment worldwide under the control of our After Sales Services division and his 50 crews.
“We were looking for a powerful maintenance solution because we are supervising a lot of equipment’s both in our manufacturing plants and at our client premises. The closest one being in Bangkok, but they can be in remote areas ranging from South America to the Himalayan mountains for a dam project.”
Dextra operates the machines in three different ways: directly (as in India, China and Thailand), through a network of global partners or by renting machines for large projects spanning 5 or 6 years.
A dedicated CMMS solution
Aurélien Gully, After Sales Service Area Manager for the Middle East, India, and APAC, explains that Dextra was looking for a dedicated and specialized maintenance tool that is unique, central and multilingual for the group’s three factories to serve the maintenance needs of 1,600 pieces of equipment. The main goal was to obtain indicators for the major machines with minimal data crunching in order to gain optimal reactivity.
Jean-Marc Pagnon, Maintenance Supervisor Worldwide, adds: “We had already been using some solutions for many years. Nevertheless, we benchmarked several solutions, but the main reason for selecting DIMO against other were the solution’s overall performance and ease of use to transfer indicators from one factory to the other in order to compare data. Flexibility was also taken into account because we needed a tool to match our requirements and the DIMO solution had this ability. We manage a lot of staff and machines around the globe. Therefore, mobility was a key factor, as we did not want our after-sales or maintenance personnel to be tied to their office or laptop, as they are often in the middle of a workshop when creating work requests or obtaining data from the system via a mobile phone.”
Addressing asset management issues efficiently
“We needed to address asset management issues and be able to locate our machines anytime, anywhere,” says Jean-Marc Pagnon. Prior to introducing DimoMaint MX, we were using various heterogeneous Excel tables and databases providing different indicators based on various criteria. It was very difficult to compare our data. We had no clear vision of our maintenance and after-sales business because we had to reformat our data, a very time-consuming activity involving a lot of paperwork.”
Regarding warehouse management, Christophe Robin, Plant Manager China, explains that checking spare parts availability in India or Thailand was quite complicated. “DimoMaint MX is a huge time saver for our maintenance personnel. Also, we can track our assets much more accurately than before, which is quite useful now when we need to plan preventive maintenance tasks.”
A phased and multilingual solution rollout
A pilot phase was initiated followed by a few adjustments and user training before full deployment. DimoMaint provided high-quality training support throughout. The Chinese language fixed and mobile versions are used, both working very well. In India and Thailand, the English version is used.
Daily decision-making support
The After Sales Department issues a lot of work requests and work orders. Now, they want to go further and schedule preventive maintenance tasks. Thawat Kaewnarmmuang, Maintenance Manager Thailand & India, is starting to query staff member availability against planned maintenance activities: “It is a completely different approach to our job because we are learning how to work in a carefully planned and efficient manner. We also use the ticketing feature via the mobile app on a daily basis in Bangkok. We can monitor our preventive maintenance tasks and analyse indicators such as MTBF and MTTR. We can also check the inventory of the three plants via an interface with Microsoft Dynamics AX. We can also share information about spare parts and machine history. It is a very innovative way of carrying out our activities, as we were previously relying on Excel files.”
Jean-Marc Pagnon is aiming to spend 60% of his department’s time on preventive maintenance, which is a challenging target: “We started the CMMS three months ago only and we covered a lot of ground thanks to the very supportive project team at DIMO. The tree structure is great, as we can now view thousands of assets to be managed from one location to another very easily. Instead of working from a standalone Excel spreadsheet, the process is now fully integrated into the DIMO CMMS, which acts as a central data repository.”
According to Jean-Marc Pagnon, After Sales and Maintenance have the same targets, i.e. making the machines perform in a reliable way: “To do this, we need to reduce downtime, optimize preventive maintenance, reduce spare part replacement time and, of course, increase customer satisfaction. The more productive the machine, the lower the maintenance costs. Implementing the DIMO CMMS did not interfere with in-house processes.”
Aiming at preventive maintenance efficiency
Christophe Regad is hoping to take full advantage of the CMMS features, most notably to become proficient in the area of preventive maintenance. “The next step is to train our partners on the CMMS. Also, we need to be able to analyse the data provided by the system to reduce maintenance costs in the coming months. We need to make sure that the information and settings are homogeneous from one factory to another because every technician needs to see what is available in a different location whenever technology and equipment transfers are carried out from one country to another. Availability should be checked at all times. Combining all these factors will help increase maintenance efficiency.”
