Valmet - a global snapshot of maintenance in the USA and the world

Challenge: Aiming for a shared maintenance overview between North America and other locations around the world

“We had researched several other maintenance software programs and were unsure if Novi would meet our needs because it was so different from the others. Eppu and the Pinja team educated us and presented a different approach to addressing our maintenance needs and now, after implementing Novi, we realize how limited the other programs actually were. Novi is flexible enough to be configured for multiple business needs and user requirements”, says Scott Griscom, Systems Manager North America Global IT Operations.

Solution: Rapid implementation and shared benefits between units

Each team member was able to utilize their own equipment lists in the system and simulate creating preventative maintenance and down machine work orders. Particular attention was devoted to standardizing fault descriptions, urgency levels and equipment classification in order to harmonize the information in North America with other sites across the world. This will provide a global view of the equipment across Valmet and provide analytics to maximize equipment uptime and review future capital investments.

“The Novi by Pinja product has been a very successful project on many levels. The implementation cycle was less than one month, with the majority of the time spent locating, documenting and updating data in our legacy systems. This was one of the main drivers for Novi to be able to consolidate MS Access programs, Lotus Notes databases and manual off-line tracking tools with limited employee access to one system that is available across all of our employees and sites”, Griscom continues.

“Today we are able to track the scope of work being performed by our maintenance departments as well as the hours spent and machine downtime. We are also able to utilize the spare parts features of Novi to track common spares across our sites and assign cost to the work being performed to get a holistic view of the cost of operating our equipment”, Griscom says.

Novi worldwide

“The plans are to expand the use of Novi outside of North America: Next in line are the Asian units starting with Wuxi, China. Although the units are located in different parts of the world, the departments’ needs are very similar. We therefore use the same system everywhere. User interfaces will, of course, be adapted to the user’s language, and Novi provides users the opportunity to personalize the user interfaces according to their needs”, says Roll Operations Director Marko Volotinen from Valmet.

“At the end of the year, we will be able to build a maintenance information system with a clean slate at a unit opened in Indonesia. We will be able to save all the device documentation to the Novi system even before the equipment enters into use, and create maintenance programs together with the equipment suppliers. Our cooperation with Pinja has gone very well. Pinja has responded to change and development needs rapidly, which has has further increased the enthusiasm of our own staff to introduce the system”, Volotinen concludes.