The brand-new sorting centre makes efficient use of its maintenance activity.
In Ghlin (Wallonia), the Val’Up sorting centre (90 jobs, nearly €40m of investment, over 10,000 m²) brings together two inter-municipal companies: IDEA (Cœur du Hainaut) and IPALLE (Picardy Wallonia and South-Hainaut) as well as two private players specialising in environmental matters: the VEOLIA and VANHEEDE groups. Val’Up is exemplary in terms of sustainability, safety and innovation in sorting: electric cranes replace bulldozers to load incoming materials. Photovoltaic panels cover around 15% of the centre’s needs: part of this is heated by the heat emitted by the process compressors, reducing the site’s environmental impact. 5,000 bags are sorted per hour, i.e. 12 tonnes/hour, 5 days a week, 24 hours a day, which represents 50,000 tonnes sorted each year from 1 in 5 Belgian citizens.
DIMO Maint CMMS was seen as essential for anticipating the deployment of preventive and corrective maintenance. Its implementation was carefully prepared upstream, as Maintenance Manager Jean-Pierre Gérard explains.
A CMMS designed well upstream of its implementation.
The solution was chosen before the plant was commissioned, which meant that the tree structure could be broken down into six levels (companies, sectors, divisions, cost centres, assets and items). This review highlighted the flows and general organisation of the processes. Inventory management, which was initially overloaded, has been fine-tuned. Following this upstream reflection, the solution was implemented smoothly over a period of a few weeks, with the data collected being fed directly and very simply into the DIMO Maint CMMS.
The solution is used for all preventive and corrective work. It brings together four main activities: work management, stock management and, in the future, the management of internal maintenance purchases. The CMMS can also be used to manage most subcontracting contracts at several levels:
- Fixed maintenance and safety contracts: scheduled dates and reminders one to two weeks in advance
- Cleaning operations: provision of sheets and to-do list.
- Troubleshooting: traceability and equipment used.
Maintenance: a key function in the smooth running of Val’Up
The slightest breakdown in one of the 170 conveyors, optical controllers, cranes, gratings and eddy currents would bring the plant to a complete standstill, with 25 people forced to stop.
An availability rate of 95% is required for the centre to reach 50,000 tonnes processed per year.
The three factors in choosing a CMMS
There were three main reasons for choosing DIMO Maint CMMS:
- Relatively simple import and export of Excel files, including stock parts, work, inventory, times and/or types of work.
- Possible connection with other systems, in particular a bearing vibration analysis database currently being studied by Val’Up. This interconnection enables work orders to be issued automatically.
- Sister companies were already using DIMO Maint, which was also a plus.
A structuring tool for the Maintenance team
The maintenance professions are under pressure, especially as the Covid pandemic has accentuated the need for meaningful work, particularly on the part of junior employees. The maintenance team is made up of 7 people, including two experienced technicians and five junior staff members. It is therefore essential to clearly define each person’s activities.
DIMO Maint CMMS is very useful for them, because it runs a program based on tasks to be carried out in a certain order and detailed work orders to be created or issued. It is also highly instructive, as the reports produced enable any maintenance staff training needs to be monitored.
According to Jean-Pierre Gérard:
For junior technicians, the CMMS can also be seen as a tool for framing, motivating and building loyalty, highlighting good safety practices and relevant checklists, and enabling knowledge to be shared through logs. This accelerates their learning curve, especially as they use the CMMS on a daily basis (almost fifty work orders a day). For Val’Up’s management, it’s also a way of monitoring their progress.”
Essential planning of maintenance tasks.
For Maintenance, it’s essential to be able to correctly and systematically plan the preventive workload on the facilities (1 hour/workstation), as the tasks are only carried out on Saturdays between 6 am and 2 pm. So DIMO Maint CMMS is proving invaluable over the long term. The plant is new and we need to ensure that the checks are not carried out at the same time, but that they are done for each component of the facility. You can’t do it without a CMMS that holds up! It allows staff to know exactly what needs to be done and when,” explains Jean-Pierre Gérard.
Val’Up is a new plant in its start-up phase. For the time being, only the maintenance team is using DIMO Maint for short-term tasks that need to be completed immediately. Production does not currently generate work orders, but the CMMS has been installed.
Multiple benefits: traceability, interconnection and user-friendliness.
The traceability offered by DIMO Maint’s CMMS and the possibility of issuing control slips for each conveyor means that we can avoid ‘black holes’, i.e. forgetting to address a particular area, which would be very damaging in the very short term, especially in the start-up phase that the plant is currently going through.
For us, preventive and predictive maintenance is crucial if we are to know what to do and when, within a given time frame and with a given number of resources,” says Jean-Pierre Gérard.
A CMMS to guarantee the sorting centre’s energy performance
Jean-Pierre Gérard explains that because Val’Up has only recently started up, it does not yet have enough of an overview for a costed ROI: “However, a facility that is well maintained in terms of lubrication, locating air leaks, checking energy recovery circuits, etc. consumes much less energy, and the CMMS makes it possible to ensure this. DIMO Maint’s preventive processes are very clear, according to him, for:
- Automatically generating work orders with precise instructions on the checks to be carried out.
- Creating work orders with plant closing and/or opening checklists, for example.
- Ensuring efficient stock management to avoid wastage.
- Developing effective analytics to anticipate and adapt maintenance slots in order to optimise off-peak times.
- Collecting vibration data is invaluable, particularly for identifying future problems and controlling costs more effectively.
The CMMS is a sort of ‘health log’ for the plant’s assets. It helps to avoid any discrepancies, to ensure the availability of facilities at optimal cost, and to anticipate problems with machines and staff management.
The CMMS helps to add value to maintenance activities.
Jean-Pierre Gérard says: Anticipation remains the key word, and it’s certain that the CMMS enhances the value of maintenance activities through total transparency, for example in terms of the amount and type of work, the availability rate, stock movements and the management of regulatory safety checks. It’s an inspection tool.”
