My plant achieved a best-in-class grade for maintenance efficacy in a recent audit. When corporate leadership asked what changed, I told them it was because we deployed Sockeye. With Sockeye, we’ve really made a huge improvement in our workforce utilization, by being able to easily schedule the right technician, to the right task, at the right time.
Jered Butz, Maintenance Planner/Scheduler, Crop Science, Bayer U.S. LLC
Bayer's Crop Science employs over 19,000 people hard at work in the agricultural industry in more than 120 countries. Celebrating 150 years, Bayer Crop Science is focused on the singular purpose to propel farming’s future, harnessing cutting-edge agricultural and environmental innovations to deliver on Bayer’s mission – “Science For A Better Life.”
Historically, Bayer Crop Science relied on office spreadsheets for maintenance scheduling to keep facilities operating reliably. Scheduling was manual – it required transposing data from the CMMS to spreadsheets and then manipulating the data. It was challenging to share and communicate schedules leading to lost productivity. The data wasn’t available for KPIs. Planners and supervisors spent more time in spreadsheets and less time on the shop floor.
“Lost productivity was really the main problem,” said Jered Butz, Maintenance Planner/Scheduler, Crop Science, Bayer U.S. LLC. “On average, it was taking me 10 hours a week to port all the data over from the CMMS and to arrange it properly in spreadsheets in order to produce a workable schedule. Even then, something would occur on a Thursday or Friday, and it would take additional hours of work to rearrange the schedule to where it needed to be. Part of our mandate at Bayer is to always look for ways to improve. There had to be a way to automate the maintenance scheduling process.”
Bayer Crop Science aims to help shape the future of the agricultural industry with innovation that enables the production of sufficient high-quality food, animal feed, and renewable raw materials for a growing world population, expected to reach ten billion people by 2050. “With the goal to optimize our processes, I began my research for automated maintenance scheduling tools,” said Jered Butz.
“After watching the Sockeye video, I realized I had found a tool that streamlined the exact processes that I had been doing manually.”
When Bayer Crop Science deployed Sockeye to simplify maintenance scheduling, Jered Butz commented on the outstanding service received.“What really made the difference was the outstanding support we received from the team at Sockeye. They have a thorough understanding of maintenance scheduling processes and industry bestpractices, which we relied on in our implementation.”
The entire Sockeye team has been very easy to work with, very customer friendly. In fact, Sockeye has set the bar in terms of how we now expect all our vendors to support us.
Sockeye maps naturally to work order scheduling processes and is so effective it reduces scheduling time by up to 75%. “The biggest pain point addressed by Sockeye was in its ability to achieve a dramatic increase in scheduling efficiency,” explained Jered Butz.
“With Sockeye, I’m able to take my list of work orders and prioritize the ones that I want on the schedule for next week. Then, by simply hitting the ‘schedule’ button, Sockeye auto-populates the schedule based on the availability of technicians. At that point, I quickly review the daily schedules to make minor adjustments.”
“Scheduling used to take me 10 hours per week. Now the process is down to 3 or 4 hours and Sockeye computes the KPIs in real- time. This gives me more time to plan and schedule and more time on the shop floor. Sockeye has allowed me to cut our backlog in half. Unlike with spreadsheets, everything in Sockeye is visible to operations. We are all working from the same source.”
Sockeye saves users effort by automatically retrieving the data needed to create weekly work order schedules without using spreadsheets. It is a natural extension of other business systems. It integrates seamlessly with all leading maintenance systems – including SAP, Oracle JDE, Infor EAM, IBM Maximo, and Avantis – to leverage real-time, dynamic data. Sockeye typically eliminates up to 90% of the data input work upfront.
“If there is one thing that a prospective customer needs to know about Sockeye, it is that it’s incredibly easy to use. It’s well designed and user friendly, which makes it very easy to manipulate and navigate through the data,” described Jered Butz. “Any prospective customer should look at that ease of use in terms of how it will bolster productivity and use that as their return on investment.”
Sockeye ships with a full suite of SMRP KPIs for compliance and utilization. Bayer Crop Science can now measure and track maintenance efficacy facility- wide.
“The Sockeye KPIs have been really helpful. Throughout the year, we are now able to track how efficient we’ve been with our scheduling and how close we are getting to our schedule compliance targets.”
Jered Butz also explained, “Tracking our corrective maintenance versus our preventive maintenance with Sockeye and being able to monitor that number has been really helpful.” Fortune 1000 enterprises, like Bayer Crop Science, rely on Sockeye to increase uptime and reduce lost time accidents. By enabling maintenance managers to streamline scheduling, Sockeye can help track and improve schedule compliance by 12 to 20 percent.
“Beyond increased maintenance productivity and efficiency, Sockeye also makes a real impact on how we manage our larger projects,” said Jered Butz. “The time that I’m saving in scheduling lets me get out in front of multi-week projects, where we’re going to be spending a significant amount of time and money. I’m able to start scheduling work orders weeks in advance to make sure we’re getting the right parts, with the right deals, along with scheduling the right technicians.”
Sockeye unites work requirements with labor availability and cues shop floor behaviors with a color coded ledger to highlight overtime and underutilization. Improved scheduling with Sockeye is shown to increase wrench time. More maintenance gets done. There are fewer breakdowns and shorter shutdowns all translating to increased production.
The impact for organizations like Bayer – in terms of optimized wrench time, improved production uptime, and reduced accidents – can typically be measured in the millions of dollars.
“Using Sockeye, I’m able to ensure we have the required time blocked out with the proper resources allocated, so that we can do a coordinated shutdown instead of an unplanned shutdown, which would cost exponentially more. With Sockeye, we’ve really made a huge improvement in our workforce utilization, by being able to easily schedule the right technician, to the right task, at the right time.”
Sockeye has enabled Bayer Crop Science to:
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