Johnsonville, LLC—one of the most popular sausage brands in the U.S.—had been using SAP ERP with good maintenance processes and well-defined workflows for years.
But it identified a need for a robust tool within its SAP platform that could plan for routine and unscheduled maintenance to help keep its production lines running smoothly.
In Search of Smarter Scheduling
To fill this gap, Bob Meyers, Johnsonville’s business partner for operations, supply chain, and engineering, and Chad Pennings, the company’s maintenance and reliability analyst, set out to find software for their SAP ERP system that would address these needs.
Once they selected a vendor, the next step was to build a cross-functional team to make sure the implementation would go smoothly and result in a system that would work for all. During the project, Meyers and Pennings realized that they needed to bring additional maintenance team leaders on board. These team members bridged the gap by communicating the progress of the project with the workers at their facilities.
“The team leaders brought feedback from the facility to us every week,” Meyers recalled. It was a hands-on team that got involved with the system to learn its capabilities. “We had to meet with some folks one-on-one to talk through the processes. But some of them had legitimate concerns that changed the scope of the project for the better. Communication takes time, but it is time well spent.”
Both men chatted with Ann Marie Gray, VP of content at ASUG, to explain the work order weighting and maintenance scheduling system that Johnsonville’s cross-functional team helped blueprint and implement.
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Register for SAP-Centric EAM to see Bob and Chad’s presentation, “Johnsonville: Reducing Downtime Through Work Prioritization and Integrated Planning and Scheduling.”