Jowat: Smarter maintenance doubles productivity with strategic insight into asset management
Transforming maintenance with SAP
Manufacturing adhesives is a complex process, and ensuring production line machines are well-maintained, safe, clean and calibrated is a constant challenge. How could Jowat empower its technicians to prioritize work more effectively, manage inventory and costs more efficiently, and make smarter strategic decisions about asset investments?
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Chemicals | Detmold, Germany | 1,280 employees | AG |
Productivity boost, raising active work orders from 45% to 90%
Reduction in maintenance backlog, from 3 months to just 3 weeks
Digital processes, eliminating paperwork and boosting traceability
SAP Manager, Jowat Corporation
Avoiding sticky situations with effective maintenance
The production line sits at the heart of any manufacturing company. If production misses a beat, the whole business feels the impact. And if a breakdown takes production offline, the consequences can be both operationally and financially disastrous.
That’s why Jowat, one of the world’s leading suppliers of industrial adhesives, takes plant maintenance very seriously. As a key supplier to the furniture, packaging, textiles, automotive and electrical industries, any delay in delivering its products could cause significant disruption and potentially cost the company and its clients millions of Euros. So, it’s vital that all production line equipment is properly maintained at all times.
Natanael Hernandez, SAP Manager at Jowat, adds: “Adhesive manufacturing is particularly challenging because of the nature of the product. Our machines need regular and thorough cleaning to avoid contamination between batches. Hot glue can be hazardous to work with, so safety is critical. And to meet our environmental goals, we aim to recycle as much of the water and oil we use as possible, which adds to the complexity and cost of labor.”
To keep operations running smoothly, Jowat’s maintenance teams need to do more than just corrective break/fix maintenance. Regular inspections and preventive maintenance are a key focus for technicians and supervisors. Moreover, many of the company’s production line machines rely on expensive components that take months to manufacture, so inventory management is vital to ensure that technicians always have the parts they need.
And in the bigger picture, Jowat also wants insight from maintenance processes to feed into strategic decision-making. Natanael Hernandez explains: “We realized that if we could gain more insight into the total cost of maintaining each of our production line machines, we could make better decisions. For example, does it make financial sense to keep this line running, or should we replace it with something more efficient?”
SAP Manager, Jowat Corporation
Digitalization transforms asset management
Until a few years ago, Jowat relied on a legacy Lotus Notes application to manage maintenance tasks. The system offered limited functionality, was not integrated with the company’s core SAP applications, and left technicians and supervisors using printouts and paper forms to manage their day-to-day tasks.
“All the paperwork made it impossible to track time and labor costs, and we had no easy way to establish an audit trail,” says Natanael Hernandez. “So, we decided to introduce the SAP Enterprise Asset Management solution (SAP EAM) to digitalize and standardize our maintenance processes.”
Integrated with Jowat’s core SAP S/4HANA software for inventory, purchasing, sales and cost accounting, SAP EAM introduced a more formal process around the creation of maintenance work orders. The solution also provides an inventory management system that enables the company to manage its stock of spare parts.
“For the first time, we had an accurate view of our inventory, as well as the cost and lead time for ordering replacements,” says Natanael Hernandez. “This not only makes it easier for us to maintain appropriate reserves; it also gives visibility to other companies within the Jowat group. So, if a plant in Germany needs a part that we have in stock in the US, they can see it and buy it from us straight away, instead of waiting months for the manufacturer to ship it to them.”
SAP EAM was a big step forward for the maintenance team as a whole, but its user interface was designed for power users sitting at full-sized screens—not mechanics and electricians working on the factory floor. “We needed something simpler and more streamlined that our technicians could use on their mobile devices,” explains Natanael Hernandez. “At the same time, we wanted to be able to track the work they were doing more accurately.”
Jowat initially looked into developing its own mobile solution using SAP Fiori, before discovering the SAP Service and Asset Manager mobile app, which is part of the Industry Cloud portfolio. “SAP Service and Asset Manager was exactly what we were looking for. We loved the simplicity, and it was a great fit for our business processes.”
Working with AG, an experienced SAP Gold Partner, Jowat launched the new mobile app at its US plant and planned a global rollout for its manufacturing sites in Germany, Malaysia and China. So far, 21 technicians are using the app on their iPad Mini devices, while seven supervisors can choose between using the app on their iPhones, or logging into the main SAP EAM interface.
To ensure adoption of the solution continues to go smoothly, Jowat is also working with the SAP Enterprise Support team, which provides effective incident management and support via the Customer Interaction Center.
SAP Manager, Jowat Corporation
Doubling productivity with an intuitive mobile solution
With SAP Service and Asset Manager, Jowat’s technicians can see all the corrective and preventive maintenance work orders assigned to them at a glance, so they can organize their work more effectively. For example, if they are assigned several tasks on the same machine or in the same area of the plant, they can do them all at once, instead of spending time going back and forth.
For supervisors, the app also makes it easier to understand the status of open work orders and prioritize more efficiently. They can move more urgent tasks forward or put less important ones on hold—and, crucially, they can document the reasons for those decisions. For example, if a work order can’t progress until a replacement part has been delivered, it’s immediately clear why the job is on hold.
The result? Since the launch of the SAP solutions for asset management, Jowat has seen a reduction in total downtime on its production lines. Moreover, productivity has effectively doubled. Before the implementation, around 45% of the work orders in the system were actively worked on by technicians. Today, that figure has risen to around 85-90%. At the same time, the maintenance backlog has been reduced by 75%, from three months to around three weeks.
“A three-week backlog is probably optimal for our business, because there will always be a proportion of tasks that have to wait for a viable maintenance window,” explains Natanael Hernandez. “The key thing is that the backlog doesn’t increase—once we got it down to three weeks, it has never crept back up again.”
The app also provides new capabilities for reviewing and approving completed work orders. Technicians can use their mobile device to take pictures of the “before” and “after” state of the assets they are working on, to document the repairs they have made. And if during a maintenance visit, a technician notices a problem that hasn’t been reported yet, they can take a photo or video and send it directly into SAP EAM to generate a new work order.
Inventory management is simpler too—whenever stock of a required component falls below a minimum threshold, the system automatically triggers a purchase requisition to order replacements.
“Before, we didn’t know what we were spending on spare parts,” adds Natanael Hernandez. “Now, we can allocate costs to specific lines, and even specific machines. With full visibility of the cost of parts and labor, we can make much more informed decisions on whether to continue maintaining an asset or replace it with a newer, more efficient machine.”
In the future, Jowat hopes to build on the success of this project by expanding its use of SAP Service and Asset Manager to introduce calibration capabilities. The company is also exploring the possibility of introducing the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solution, as well as taking advantage of Predictive Material and Resource Planning (pMRP) functionality in SAP S/4HANA.
“At the moment, our focus is on maintenance, but we know there is so much more we can do,” concludes Natanael Hernandez. “We’re excited to work with SAP and great partners like AG to explore the possibilities.”
SAP Manager, Jowat Corporation
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AG is an independent award-winning SAP specialist consultancy and SAP Gold Partner recognised for quality and innovation in SAP. To learn more, visit www.agcapps.com