Site: Manistee, MI

Description of the Site: The General Chemical Manistee plant is a Calcium Chloride production facility located in northwest Michigan. It is one of two General Chemical calcium chloride facilities. Their other production plant, in Amherstburg, Ontario, is the site of an ongoing SAMI Maintenance and Reliability Improvement effort as well.

Nature of the Opportunity: As calcium chloride demand has increased, General Chemical began looking for another facility to purchase, to increase their production capacity. They found what they were looking for in a shutdown plant in Michigan and acquired it in October of 2000. It was quickly discovered that their newly acquired plant, while a gem as far as the equipment and work force was concerned, had a very crude and rudimentary maintenance system that did not fit in with the company’s long term maintenance and production goals.

In order to hold costs down, ensure equipment reliability and maintain their very lean maintenance and production workforce, maintenance management work processes immediately became a focus for the new facility even as the plant was being re-commissioned

What We Did: We began our work with an assessment of the past maintenance practices under the previous owners and developed a plan to update and enhance this system until a planned CMMS implementation took place. Reactive maintenance was found to be the norm, with no planning and little scheduling, no backlog management, no equipment records and no preventive maintenance program.

Working with the small management team, we developed and installed:

• a new work order system that collected all of the information necessary for a basic maintenance system
• a revised daily work schedule and maintenance planning routines, including daily / weekly joint production and maintenance planning meetings
• a database to accumulate backlog and maintenance system information.
• a backlog management process and a spares availability program which was tied into the planning and scheduling routines
• and this interim work management system was designed and developed to be quickly and easily dropped into CMMS when it is finally installed.

General Chemicals – Manistee has continued to implement the system after SAMI's full time involvement, recognizing that, while change is difficult, it is necessary if they are to hold maintenance costs down, ensure equipment reliability and maintain their very lean maintenance and production workforce

Results: The work at Manistee has resulted in more work activities being planned and scheduled, as well as more hours being applied to scheduled work. Emergent work is decreasing and the number of hours spent on actual wrench time has increased. On the whole, General Chemicals - Manistee has a system in place to measure and control Maintenance costs and Maintenance performance.