Dovechem makes great savings and improve the management of preventive and corrective maintenance tasks thanks to CMMS.
Breakdowns, contract management, stocks, work orders and purchase orders all available at a click.
Dovechem is an established company in providing the trading of chemical solvents, production of resins and paints, manufacturing of steel containers and marketing of highly-specialized engineering fastening systems. Their Singapore site (60 persons) provides safe and reliable terminal operations and maintenance services to Singapore Lube Park – a joint venture of a group of Lube Oil Blending Plant Companies including Shell, Total and Sinopec, which stores lubricant oil.
So far, Dovechem has been using Excel to handle their maintenance, but this solution had limitations. Therefore, they started to look for a more flexible, easy-to-use yet high-performance computerized maintenance management system CMMS.
A broad scope of maintenance tasks for leading industrial lubricant firms
Dovechem maintains Singapore Lube Park’s 77 product tanks (31 for Shell, 36 for Total and 10 for Sinopec). The company carries out preventive and corrective maintenance tasks on a variety of equipment, such as pumps, motors, heaters and other utilities involved in terminal operations.
Concerning preventive maintenance, Dovechem checks for instance motors, greasing, inspections, motor vibration readings i.e. repetitive tasks carried out on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. As far as corrective maintenance is concerned, they troubleshoot lighting equipment or any repair task to be carried out immediately after a breakdown.
Switching from Excel to a powerful yet flexible CMMS
Messrs Goh Chip Kian, Maintenance Supervisor and Mark Louie Montano, Maintenance and Logistics Specialist explain that Dovechem were looking for a tool to keep track of their maintenance activities. Before selecting DimoMaint, they had been using Excel, with had limitations in terms of size and flexibility. They could only rely on the execution dates and times, which had to be entered manually, along with the next scheduled maintenance interventions and a brief description of the tasks carried out.
A clear overview of maintenance costs and tasks
Dovechem selected DimoMaint MX against 2 other asset management solutions. “DimoMaint was much more user-friendly and one of the partners already used it, so with their guidance, we felt it would be a great continuity” according to Goh Chip Kian and Mark Louie Montano.
A 6-month, phased deployment phase
The deployment took 3 to 6 months as Dovechem had to prepare the capture of all the necessary data to populate the DimoMaint solution. A test platform was setup for the corrective maintenance module on December 2019, then the preventive maintenance setup took place on March 2020 and restructured on June 2020. For any issue raised, the maintenance team generates a ticket. The DIMO Support team is responsive and helpful, especially when it comes to parameter settings and selecting the appropriate data for upload.
“Using the solution had a significant impact on the department, specifically with regard to contract renewals. Everything is stored in the system and we now have a clear overview of start and expiry dates. Besides, we can now monitor the various breakdowns and the associated cost” say Messrs Goh and Mark.
Planning ahead is made easier
Also, the work orders generated by DimoMaint for new preventive maintenance tasks are of great help. Dovechem can better plan ahead as far as interventions are concerned. “Prior to carrying out corrective maintenance tasks, we issue workorders. They are tied with purchase orders, which totalled about 206 so far. We also carry out stock taking on a monthly basis. So far, we dealt with 1,348 workorders, with about 100 ongoing”.
Whenever Dovechem creates work orders, there is direct link with the assets. And by looking into the assets, they can have the list of breakdowns, the breakdown date, etc. They have an end-to-end overview of their maintenance, which was impossible with Excel.
Significant organizational changes
“Using the DimoMaint CMMS tool made us change our procedures. For instance, purchasing used to be done entirely through paperwork. Now, the process is fully-digitalized, and we have purchase order numbers, and POs are delivered by mail. Initially, whenever there was a need for a purchase order, we had to hand it over to the appropriate person in charge”.
Although Dovechem are aware of some savings, they reckon it is difficult to make an estimate on an ROI right now. As things were done manually prior to using DimoMaint, they believe it will take 3 to 5 years because they have just starting using the DimoMaint MX solution and all the assets are not in the database yet.
In the future, they are hoping to be able to deploy the solution in Myanmar.
