Case Study

Bayer implements Indus enterprise asset management at Sarnia, Ontario Plant

Bayer Inc., the Canadian subsidiary of Bayer AG, has successfully implemented a new enterprise asset management (EAM) system at its Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, rubber facility in only six months.

The software, Enterprise MPAC (EMPAC) 8.5, comes from Indus International Inc. (San Francisco). Bayer was already using Indus' work management and purchasing modules.

"We selected Indus because of their specialized, leading-edge technology solutions for all our manufacturing and production needs," says Bayer IT manager John Felton. According to Felton, that the system will enable the company to reduce costs, achieve higher uptime, and better evaluate maintenance systems and supplier performance.

EAM systems, which seek to move beyond maintenance management and manage corporate assets to optimize their availability, use process information from smart sensors to monitor the health of a manufacturing system and predict maintenance requirements.

Where enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems look at the world in terms of products, EAM systems define optimization in terms of assets by delivering the capacity ERP systems need to optimize production.

Approximately 600 Bayer employees at Sarnia will use EMPAC to report and track information.

"We wanted a system that would allow us detailed tracking of all our operations for purchasing, storehouse, maintenance planning/scheduling, and project engineering requirements," Felton explains. "EMPAC is a centralized source of information that will help us reduce inventory, provide online performance indicators, and support reliability-centered preventative maintenance."

Among EMPAC's capabilities:

Work management

  • Asset maintenance
  • Labor/work management
  • Component tracking
  • Warranty tracking
  • Asset optimization
  • Project tracking
  • Capacity tracking

Materials and procurement management

  • Stores management
  • Procurement
  • Invoice matching

EAM performance package

  • Workflow management
  • EDMS functionality
  • Report preparation
  • Mobile computing devices
  • eCommerce tools

For more information: Indus International Inc., 60 Spear St., San Francisco, CA 94105. Tel: 415-904-5000. Fax: 415-904-5050.

Edited by Angelo DePalma
Managing Editor, Pharmaceutical Online and Drug Discovery Online
Email: adepalma@vertical.net