Interfor® is one of North America’s largest lumber and wood product producers, operating in a marketplace where maintenance is a key performance indicator of financial success.

In a commodity market, minimal unplanned downtime provides the ability to manufacture as efficiently as possible and maximize operating margins. The company decided to deploy Attune EAM across all its mills, standardizing maintenance of business-critical equipment across its plants to create high reliability systems and boost bottom-line results.

Standardize and consolidate for maximum efficiency

Over the last decade, Interfor has grown its number of operations through acquisition. At some of its newly acquired operations, preventive maintenance procedures needed to be improved. A global look at maintenance protocols and procedures across all of its facilities showed the need for standardization of maintenance and consolidation of areas such as purchasing.

While several different maintenance systems were in use at various mills, Attune EAM was being used at two of the company’s facilities and demonstrating the functionality Interfor envisioned for all of its operations. The company decided to standardize on Attune EAM and is already enjoying rapid deployment, expecting EAM to be standard across all plants within two years.

Beyond maintenance and the obvious benefits of reducing equipment and asset failure, Attune EAM also allows unprecedented visibility into Interfor’s entire purchasing history and practices. Knowing what it buys—and how it buys it, across multiple facilities—will provide the company with consolidated data that will help in negotiating better pricing agreements with suppliers.

A cultural shift

More than simply deploying functionality in its plants, Interfor is also taking the opportu-nity to create a strategic shift toward preventive maintenance and making it

top-of-mind across functions. It is starting to build collective knowledge around mainte-nance best practices and continuous improvement. By being able to record maintenance in real time, measure results, and extract real-time reports by asset, its skilled maintenance staff are using Attune EAM to facilitate valuable information sharing. It is also exchanging insights into how to optimize maintenance using the process and experience of its facilities working with similar equipment.

The path to predictability

The company is also starting to leverage data analytics that not only precisely monitor equipment and prevent failure, but also create a roadmap for predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance is only made possible with visibility into the history of maintenance performed—looking precisely at maintenance schedules, parts replacement, applicable safety requirements, and staff notes. Attune EAM collects and stores that information, and makes it accessible whenever and wherever it’s needed.

Mobile enablement

Interfor is looking forward to leveraging the mobility of EAM across all of its mills. Staff will not have to keep a paper list of tasks performed or submit that record to a supervisor who then scans the information and files it away. With Attune EAM, technicians will have any maintenance checklists and specifications at their fingertips. As they perform maintenance, it will be recorded directly into EAM along with photos. Beyond the benefits to the maintenance staff, planners and schedulers are also able to better find the root cause of equipment issues and include that in a more accurate and complete work order.

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