Founded in 1948 as the Westfälische Papierfabrik in Arnsberg, the WEPA® Group has developed into a market leader in the manufacturing of sustainable hygiene paper products.
Today, with around 4,000 employees, the company runs 13 locations across Europe. The company has 21 paper machines and more than 90 processing machines for rolled and folded hygiene paper products.
As one of the leading hygiene paper product manufacturers in Europe, the WEPA Group operates in a capital- and energy-intensive industry. Strong competition and rising costs for energy and raw materials have led to an increasingly challenging market environment. To remain competitive, it’s imperative for the company to have efficient organizational processes.
Finding a comprehensive solution
In order to address its functional challenges, WEPA needed a system that offered a comprehensive suite of enterprise asset management capabilities. Especially important was the capability to collect equipment and facilities data around specifications, warranties, service contracts, replacement parts, purchases, expected life, and preventive maintenance.
Doing its due diligence, WEPA’s management team found that Attune EAM (formerly HxGN EAM) not only had the functions and features needed to improve efficiency, but it also had sophisticated reporting and analysis tools that would allow the team to plan its manufacturing orders in detail, including material reservation and costing. Mobility was one of the determining factors for the organization because it would directly benefit maintenance technicians, enabling them to roam between connected and disconnected environments without having to worry about losing application performance.
Cost-effective, scalable deployment
Due to its multiple locations, WEPA decided to deploy Attune EAM in the cloud, which eliminated the need to maintain an IT hardware landscape at each site. A multi-tenant deployment model offered a shared, secure infrastructure that could scale up when they needed more capacity or scale-down during off-peak times. With the help of Attune EAM partner IHM AG, the system implementation started at the Müschede location in 2016, and the other sites followed over the next twelve months. H2: Business challenges Content:
Enhancing operational efficiency
Enabling faster decision-making
Increasing throughput
Reducing IT overhead while managing asset maintenance at multiple sites
The transformative impact
Content: Attune EAM helps WEPA standardize its maintenance processes across the company, streamline workflow, automate business rules, and achieve more detailed tracking of assets. The fully web-architected solution with an advanced integrated suite of modules allows the organization to have flexible business operations.
Corporate planning especially benefits from the Attune EAM implementation. The solution’s work management features make it easy for WEPA’s team to effectively plan for and allocate personnel resources, which, in turn, facilitates asset localization and has enabled product feasibility studies.
Moreover, Attune EAM’s intuitive and versatile interface makes employee training and adoption easy by allowing users to readily access the information and functionality that best suits their specific roles. In terms of reporting, the follow-up tools simplify management of maintenance activities and have proven to be particularly useful in the processing of the work order backlog.
With Attune EAM, WEPA has improved the uptime of production plant and machinery within its high-volume manufacturing environment, reduced the carried inventory of engineering stocks within its portfolio, and delivered return on investment (ROI) for the entire standardization project. Octave’s asset management solution has helped improve machine utilizations and enabled higher profitability at WEPA.
Expanding footprint
Attune EAM is a highly scalable solution that continues to support the company’s growth and expansion. The success of the Attune EAM project has led to the expansion of our footprint at WEPA. In order to systematically execute building condition assessment and manage the health and maintenance of its facilities, WEPA has decided to implement Attune EAM Facilities Edition with Attune EAM at its core.
Business results
Enhanced productivity through standardized processes and streamlined workflows
Delivered faster work order processing via Improved data accessibility and reporting
Increased profitability due to higher machine uptime and reduced inventory of engineering stocks
Lowered total cost of ownership by eliminating IT infrastructure at each site
