Enterprise asset management helps Belgian food producer Agristo improve maintenance efficiency and overall employee experience

Specialist European frozen food maker Agristo says maintenance teams at its growing network of production facilities are no longer fixing equipment based on gut feel, but are instead using accurate data to better manage and improve their machinery’s utilization.

This transformation, says the company’s Chief Group Maintenance Consultant Steven Volckaert, has become possible after digitizing core factory processes centered on enterprise asset management (EAM) technology.

Efficiency is rising, he explains, because pre-EAM there was only “minimal” digital logging of maintenance requests and completed jobs, which made it difficult to analyze workloads, manage parts inventory, and monitor the condition of the specialist machinery the company relies on.

That made it hard, he states, to gain real insight into the overall health of equipment and keep orders flowing at the rate management demanded.

But with EAM – sourced from Netherlands-based Ultimo – the company now logs every request, action, and ticket resolution, making it much simpler to track the real maintenance picture, Volckaert says.

One example of the optimization he sought is a more efficient way to record which parts have been replaced in a unit.

Pre-EAM, technicians would type in part names manually, but different operators could use different spellings or inconsistent capitalization, resulting in poor data capture.

By selecting part names from a supplied list in the software instead, he says, technicians save time while ensuring consistency in company-wide reporting and stock management.

As a result, the company believes that hands-on maintenance time has increased from 25 percent of technicians’ workdays to approximately 60-65 percent, by reducing time previously spent waiting for jobs, looking at documentation, or searching for parts.

Potato-based goodness

Volckaert works for a specialist, privately held food producer that has been manufacturing frozen potato products since 1986, including traditional Belgian fries (either frites or frietjes, depending on which part of the country is ordering them), croquettes, and other potato-based specialties.

The company primarily serves retailers, food service distributors, and the processing industry in over 130 countries.

Based in Harelbeke, Belgium, Agristo operates three production sites in the country plus one in the Netherlands, which together produce over 800,000 metric tons of frozen potato-based products annually.

Volckaert joined the company in 2017 as it was preparing to open a new factory.

Leadership had decided that IT at the organization was somewhat reactive, and believed it could better leverage information to improve efficiency.

This became his responsibility on the maintenance side of the operation—leading him to explore how leading EAM vendors could help.

Volckaert says:

There really wasn’t a central maintenance function before I came, so my role has been to digitize, uniform, and standardize the way of working of the technical departments across the plants and the future plants.

These guys always do a great job, but there was just too much Excel, paper notes, or crosses on the backs of their hands; they love getting dirty and feeling they’ve worked hard every day, but we also needed to capture what they were doing centrally in a better way.

Volckaert stresses that any software he considered had to be one the actual frontline workers wanted to use:

I had seen change management fail when driven top-down, so, working with the CIO, we invited in the three companies that best fit our company values. For us, it didn’t matter which EAM system it would be, because every software system is an empty box in the beginning– it’s how you use it, it’s how you fill it, and how you integrate it into your company that makes it work, you need the whole ecosystem around it.

Ultimo was the software the team liked best, he says, making it an easy decision to sign the contract.

Metrics of potato production success

When it comes to measuring success, Volckaert says it’s effectively impossible to benchmark against the pre-EAM era, as there simply isn’t enough data from that phase.

However, since implementation in 2018, concrete metrics have started to accumulate.

These include:

• 24,431 pieces of equipment registered and monitored in the system
• 16,651 HSE (health & safety) incidents registered and followed up over five years
• 2,207 facility rooms currently monitored in the system

In those five years, Agristo has recorded nearly 600,000 jobs, with 8,551 active jobs currently open in the company’s 24/7 working regime.

This represents considerable growth since the platform went live in 2020, which saw just 53,695 jobs created and 46,330 completed – or 127 maintenance tasks performed daily, he points out.

Volckaert believes the foundation of this success with EAM comes from building a good “asset tree”—a hierarchical structure representing the organization of assets within an organization.

He says many EAM users get this wrong because they think about how a plant is laid out geographically, but he wanted a generic structure that could be easily replicated at new sites.

He explains:

So, we looked at what we do through the production process and not on how the plant was laid out and then made a step-by-step plan on how we could implement the software to match that logically.

This was then implemented in ways that actual users could embrace:

We really focused on user-friendliness and minimalization of data right from the start, because a technician is never going to be excited about filling in fields for you, they want to work on the machinery, and so you have to convince that person to fill in all his data and link it to the right equipment in the system.

So, by making it really easy for people we implemented work order management first at one site, which was our pilot plan, and then went on to the next sites.

Concern for staff extends beyond new workflows, he adds:

It’s hard to find good technicians, and they don’t stay as long as they used to, you don’t find technicians anymore.

But if you already have good technicians you are not using efficiently, instead of adding extra technicians, we want to offer a good, uniform, easy way of working that is great for them but also dramatically improves their efficiency, too.

Next steps

Volckaert’s major focus now is transferring EAM discipline to the two new production facilities the company is establishing in Uttar Pradesh (India) and Escaudoeuvres (France).

Using established templates for maintenance and asset management from existing Agristo plants will make getting up and running straightforward, he predicts:

Over the next six months we really want to start using our data for analytics as the basis for a more reliable and predictive mindset in the way we work–going on to the next level and using that data to improve our factories of the future.

For Volckaert, this positive experience with digitization and enterprise asset management can be summed up as:

We have stopped all that time wasted looking at the defect, opening the machine, realizing we don’t have the spare parts and so on – now we know what needs to be done, and we can fix it right.

And, right away!