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The Client

Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. is a leading world-wide supplier of industrial gases, related equipment and chemicals - employing more than 16,000 and having sales approaching $5 billion.

The Task

Optimisation of in-house and subcontract resources to meet plant shutdown maintenance and refurbishment schedules.

Background

From its European headquarters in Surrey, Air Products has used Hornet since the early 80's to plan refurbishment and maintenance shutdowns for its 50 European production sites. In 1996, the company upgraded to Hornet Windmill. Shutdowns typically take place during summer and winter holidays but can also be planned to occur at other times. They usually take place over a fixed period of a few days and may involve several trades and management disciplines which require tight co-ordination to the hour if production interruptions are to be avoided. Careful preparation in terms of communication of agreed and credible maintenance and refurbishment plans to internal managers and subcontractors is essential.

Specification

Hornet were invited to provide a system that would enable the Company to:

• maintain a rolling plan to optimise the use of corporate and subcontract maintenance resources across all 30 European plants.
• generate detailed maintenance and refurbishment plans for each plant.

Air Products required that the reports produced by the system should:

• cater for multiple concurrent projects having durations generally less than seven days.
• show activity and resource requirements on an hourly basis
• allow activities to be colour coded by trade - e.g. electrical, mechanical, building.
• permit analysis by activity trade and value.
• allow activities within reports to be annotated with general text fields.
• be capable of customisation to show company headers, footers, logos and legends.

In addition, Air Products required that the system should allow:

• comprehensive resource and cost management codes to be applied to activities - to permit the reports to be analysed and presented in a wide variety of formats to suit different management needs.
• resource-limited scheduling - allowing time schedules to be re-adjusted to meet resource limits where necessary.

What Hornet did

Hornet worked with Air Products to ensure that the functionality of Hornet 5000i incorporated all the features required by the Company. All these features are now standard in Hornet Windmill and available to all users.

The Outcome

Air Products have planning systems capable of providing both overall and detailed views of current and future maintenance operations across multiple plants that enable the company to plan internal and external resource requirements and provide local managers with plans and reports to suit their needs.