Ifolor

Challenge: At Ifolor production must be in order at all times, so that strict delivery time promises can be kept with certainty

The photo industry experienced a huge change as old film spools were replaced with memory cards when the last century changed. As a pioneer in the industry Ifolor’s predecessor, Ifi, begun producing 10 x 10-18 cm photos from digital images provided by their clients in 1999. The first years of 21th century were difficult for the photo industry. People still took pictures, but they were lost in computer memory banks. Only few people wanted their pictures on paper.

A change for the better occurred in 2006 as the Swiss company called Photocolor Kreuzlingen AG bought Ifi. A year later the name of the company changed to Ifolor. Under new ownership the product selection went through major changes. In 2008, cards, calendars and photo albums were added to the selection. From then on, the photo album has become Ifolor’s highest selling product.

“Now, depending on how we count, we have about 30 to 40 products. The traditional photo isn’t dead as a product either, as over 20 % of our revenue comes from regular photos. On the busiest weeks we produce up to a million photos,” production director Timo Jokinen reports.

Solution: More efficient production maintenance with the Novi by Pinja maintenance system

Even though Ifolor’s production machines run at maximum during peak seasons, there are some large volume sales in off-seasons as well. The production must be ready to go all the time so the strict delivery times can be upheld without failure. This is why Ifolor felt it was necessary to develop the maintenance of the production machines. Excel files and paper reports didn’t match the company’s needs anymore.

Maint was implemented in the facilities in Kerava in 2013 and a little later in the production facilities in Switzerland.

“We decided to start organising maintenances and wanted our operators to have an easy way to make error reports and call for maintenance. We were able to implement Maint efficiently from the get go. But we moved on to using the newer Novi system quite soon after as it has a more visual user interface than Maint,” Jokinen explains.

“Implementing Novi was extremely easy, because some of the basic work had already been done during the transition to Maint. Novi is very user friendly and the user interface is clear,” says Tobias Lang from the factory in Switzerland.

In Kerava, the change from Maint to Novi was made in the summer of 2015. Krister Kasper says they were able to transport the information saved in Maint automatically into Novi once the new server was up.

“The transition was quite easy. The systems were down for only one day, so we were able to start using Novi very quickly,” Kasper recalls.

Uncomplicated and agile cooperation

After the acquisition of the maintenance system, Ifolor has been able to cut production times even by 40 %. Kasper and Jokinen believe that the improvement in production efficiency has been influenced by many factors, among these is using Maint and Novi.

“With Novi we have been able to develop the cooperation between production and maintenance. Maintenance requests and their status are now available for everyone. The operations are transparent and everyone has real-time information at their disposal. This has had a significant impact on the atmosphere at work. On important factor is that now we can access the whole maintenance history of the machines,” Jokinen says.

Ifolor plans to make the most out of Novi in the future. This year, the company is focused on inputting preventing maintenances into the system. They will also implement spare part system management and lifecycle analysis.

“With the lifecycle analysis we can see how the spare part and maintenance requirements of the machines develop. Based on this information we can assess when to renew the machines,” Jokinen explains.

In Switzerland, Novi’s benefits have become concrete in many ways. “Now we have documents of the equipment and machine data and the history of flaws and errors recorded into Novi. The system is used for planning and managing daily maintenance and preventive maintenance. Production malfunction notices appear directly in Novi and the maintenances are planned together more often with production. The maintenance situation is now apparent to production. The next stage of the plans is to implement Novi in to tablets and thus to increase work flexibility even more,” says Lang from the factory in Switzerland.