Premier Manufacturing Support Services, Inc.

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Background
Premier Manufacturing Support Services, Inc., headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a leading provider of manufacturing support services to the global automotive industry. Our goal is to create customized and integrated programs of labor services, technology and materials management that make measurable improvements in our customers' quality, production uptime and total cost.

Premier was founded in 1984. Voith AG acquired Premier in 2005. Voith is a market-leading provider of paper-making technology, power transmission, energy technology and industrial services. Voith has over 24,000 employees and maintains operations in over 200 locations.

The Goals
Premier won a multimillion dollar contract from a global automotive supplier that called for the company to service 50 sites across the United States and Mexico.  As part of this contract, Premier assured the customer that it would produce a 100 percent return on the investment (ROI) in one year’s time. The ROI would be achieved by Premier improving the customer’s production efficiency through more efficient asset utilization and labor practices. As the focal point of this engagement, Premier needed to deploy an asset management system that could optimize its operations across all 50 plants. By definition, this mandated a Web-architected solution that could encompass all of the plants with a single deployment and provide the robust functionality required to:

• Reduce downtime
• Improve productivity
• Meet linguistic requirements
• Identify and analyze trends and anomalies across the enterprise
• Track and capitalize on previously unrecognized warranty claims

A Web-architected solution would also enable Premier to standardize its processes and transfer best practices across all 50 sites, because all sites would work off a common application and database. These capabilities would be critical for Premier to meet its aggressive ROI requirements.

Challenges
The functionality of Premier’s existing client/server asset management system did not meet the company’s needs for the new engagement. As with all client/server systems, client and server software had to be installed at each site, resulting in "siloed" operations where each site uses its own systems and data. These types of systems do not enable the sharing of data across sites and do not provide a consolidated view of operations. This makes it extremely difficult to standardize operations because there is no common application to support the business processes. "Our technicians were generating reports from different data and sets of criteria which meant inconsistent methods for tracking assets, doing cost comparisons, and managing asset allocation," said Eric Faith, manager of maintenance systems technology at Premier. "Without commonality among reports, we had no way to know why some plants and equipment were more effective and efficient than others."

Furthermore, the existing system could not track warranty claims. Since these claims can add up to enormous sums of money each year, this functionality alone would go a long way toward helping Premier achieve its ROI goals.

Solution
After researching all of the leading asset management systems, Premier chose the Datastream 7i Asset Performance Management solution. No other solution could match the Datastream 7i combination of robust functionality, multi-site capabilities and asset analytics for drilling down into operational data to derive intelligence used for optimizing operations across sites.  Datastream’s Professional Services team brought the experience to identify maintenance management requirements and integrate the solution with existing systems to deliver a quality implementation.

Premier can now compare plant and asset performance and, through the application of Datastream 7i Analytics, derive valuable business information from existing asset data. The company can compare operational efficiency across plants, identify under-performing assets and determine the root causes for the problems. For example, if a piece of equipment in Mexico City is breaking down more often than an identical piece of equipment in Detroit, Premier can identify the processes used to maintain the equipment in Detroit and transfer them to Mexico City to solve the problem. Datastream 7i Analytics, an advanced module, also provides Premier with in-depth, flexible reporting and graphing capabilities so the company can analyze key metrics, forecast performance issues and take action to optimize performance.

With all of its operations working under the same application, Premier can successfully standardize processes and transfer best practices across multiple sites. In addition, the multi-language, multi-currency support better equips workers to do their jobs since they can read and interpret reports and statistics in their native language.  

"Implementing Datastream 7i was straightforward, fast and easy, and because the set-up is only entered once into the system, we have already seen huge benefits from the deployment," Faith said. "For the first time, individual plants have access to common information and can make decisions in real time."

Using Datastream 7i, for example, one plant manager eliminated the need for more than 60 trucks without affecting productivity, thereby reducing his equipment inventory by one-third and saving $500,000.  Additional benefits include the ability to:

• Detect and stop abuse or improper use of equipment
• Run utilization reports to establish benchmarks against which future operations can be measured
• Automatically calculate cost savings through "what if" scenarios
• Analyze historic data to predict future job requirements (for example, determining staffing requirements based on similar jobs performed in the past)

Results
With the deployment of Datastream 7i, Premier was able to deliver on customer expectations and exceed the ROI requirements. The deployment radically increased worker productivity, improved equipment uptime and generated enormous savings through properly processed warranty claims. In the first three months of the deployment, Premier realized more than $70,000 in warranty claims that would have gone unprocessed under the old system.

Premier is now able to perform previously impossible functions, such as tracking the use of mobile equipment for all plants on one system, comparing site performance with real-time data analysis and delivering quantifiable ROI to customers based on accurate and timely data.

Premier has also optimized its total cost of application ownership by choosing to have Datastream host the application, eliminating the personnel and equipment costs associated with hosting the application in-house. 

"We have experienced immediate results from our deployment of Datastream 7i, and we continue to exceed customer expectations," says Faith. "There is no question that this is the best solution for our needs."

The Datastream 7i asset performance management solution reduced downtime and increased the productivity of Premier’s multi-site operations. Web services and asset analytics enabled Premier to implement best practices across the enterprise and benefit from unrecognized warranty claims for increased revenue.