Service Policy For Automotive Fuel Tank Manufacturer

Our Customer is one of the world’s largest automotive fuel tank manufacturers, with factories across the USA, Europe and Asia.

The company were facing a shortage in skilled maintenance staff, which was causing a series of issues impacting line efficiency.

Challenges

As well as this, hiring new specialist staff did not guarantee long-term security. If team members left again, this would mean the process would need to be repeated, leaving the line open to risk once more.

With this in mind, the customer approached Vacuum Engineering Services for support. The company had heard about our service offer of unlimited technical support by phone and email. In addition to this 24-hour helpline, we could also provide;

A guarantee on spare parts replaced during service activities
Monthly visits on-site to perform preventative & predictive maintenance routines
An on-site engineer in case of machine breakdown
Access to local stock of spare parts

Solution

To begin with, our solution involved an on-site assessment, inclusive of a health check of the machines. This looked into several areas such as;

The age of the machines
Mechanical conditions
Electrical conditions
Machine performance
Plant maintenance routines

Once all areas had been sufficiently assessed, we were then able to create a tailored service policy plan for our Customer, based on the status of each machine.

We proposed an integral service policy for all 4 machines, with monthly visits that would include a major overhaul, and a 6-monthly immediate overhaul – inclusive of all spare parts.

As the Customer did not have access to spare pumps for helium leak testing, we also offered a pump exchange program. This meant that while our engineers were servicing the pumps, we could provide a replacement that could be used during maintenance, reducing machine downtime and increasing the Overall Equipment Effectiveness [OEE].

Additionally, troubleshooting training was also included in our offer, so that new technicians could easily fix the most common problems.

To further support our Customer, we were able to spread the total cost of this service policy over 12 monthly payments, which was a big help for the finance team in cash flow planification.

The overall implementation took place over a period of 12 months. During this time, we were also able to identify further opportunities for improvement within processes. For example, an operator was frequently experiencing difficulty verifying one of the machines – this was due to the test piece disintegrating. To help overcome this, we manufactured a support nest for the test piece, in turn reducing load and unload time by 4 seconds.