We are starting with the stories of just a few Oz users; If you are an Oz user, feel free to send us your stories as well and we will be happy to post them on our web page.
City of Farmington
Anchor Glass/Jacksonville
Ansul Fire Suppression & Building Products
Fri, 16 Jan 2009
Animas and Bluffview power plants are co-gen gas turbine/steam turbine plants, and Navajo is a hydroelectric plant.
Animas currently has 3 generators in service, one 22MW and two 3MW. Bluffview has 2 generators, one 33MW and one27 MW. Navajo has two 16MW generators.
They supply power to a large part of San Juan County, New Mexico, an area of approximately 5500 square miles and 110,000 people (the Navajo Tribal Utility supplies power to the western-most areas of the county on the reservation). All three of their power stations are tied to the grid, so no one plant supplies power to a specific part of the service area.
City of Farmington had been using OOPS! since 1989 - 16 years - when in 2005 they decided to move to the Oz system. Kim Townsend's reasoning. . . if you buy a Harley and it works, you're happy with it and the dealer takes care of you, when its time, you're going to buy another Harley from that same dealer. Comparing Oz to a Harley, I like that. Someone else compared it to Cadillac once.
Kim says they use Oz for PM Work Orders, Corrective Work Orders and Operator-Submitted Work Orders. They are not currently using Oz for Inventory, but they are thinking about it - down the road.
Kim tells us they haven't had a blackout or brownout caused by a generation maintenance related failure for a number of years and that this is due, in large part, to having virtually all maintenance tasks on PMs in their Oz system (These guys did an excellent job in setting their PMs up in OOPS! and the OOPS! data was brought into Oz during the conversion. We were also able to help with some "clean-up" at the same time) According to Kim, performing the Pms from Oz in a timely fashion prevents unexpected failures.
The Farmington area has experienced a bit of a growth spurt in recent years and Bluffview is a fairly new plant. Kim admits that they did have to shut down the Bluffview Plant not long ago because of plugged air intake filters on the gas turbine, but stated that they are still developing PMs to help them monitor the Bluffview equipment. PM's do sometimes have to be "tweaked" and we always tell people, Oz should be considered a "work in progress"
Even so, Kim credits Oz with saving them some major problems. He says a good example would be the annual PM they use to perform vibration tests on a boiler feed pump. The tests reveal when a bearing is failing. He said they are able to remove the pump from service and replace a bad bearing before the pump is damaged.
Kim tells us his experience with Oz has been "very positive...Oz is intuitive to use, very reliable, and priced reasonably. . . Support is excellent!"
He finds the feature in Oz that allows their plant operators to enter work orders on the internet to be "simple and fast", and he claims it "actually encourages operators to use it (Oz)."
January, 2009
Anchor Glass in Jacksonville, FL makes bottles, beer bottles to be specific and we can tell you, it is one impressive operation. They run 24/7 and in order to become as productive as possible, it was necessary that they improve their uptime. With Oz's help, they did.
Carl Mays from Anchor Glass wrote that in 2001 Anchor Jacksonville was the worst plant in the corporation, maybe even in the industry, and that at one time the Vice President came in and told them they were being considered for shut down. They turned things around and the Jacksonville plant went "from worst to first".
Anchor Jax first installed Oz in their "Hot End" in September, 2002. At the time the yearly uptime average was 86.7%. They now have a yearly average of 96.2% with 96.7% being the highest monthly average. (WOW!)
Prior to 2002 Anchor Jacksonville produced 2.3 million bottles every day. That seems like an awful lot to me, but now, they produce 2.7 million bottles a day, the same type bottle as in 2002.
Their Plant Management was big on tracking downtime and using Oz., Anchor Jacksonville was able to identify problems with equipment which were causing downtime. As a result of Oz's downtime analysis, ring arms, hangers and other machine variables were replaced to make the machine more reliable and efficient. This resulted in uptime gains from 1.86% in 2002 to .51% in 2003 with a current downtime of only .6%. This translates to 24,000 bottles per day gain since 2002.
So what were the dollars saved? Well, they tell us: 1% = $630,000 per year up-time dollars.
We won't presume to claim credit for Anchor's success, but Carl tells us when utilized properly, Oz can increase a company's profitability by thousands of dollars a year".
Carl is impressed with the reliability of the Oz system.
After the successful installation of Oz in the "Hot End", they added Oz in the "Cold End".
We're proud to have Anchor Jacksonville as an Oz user and wish them "only uptime"
Ansul started using OOPS! in 1996 to control their inventory. In November of 2007 they decided to take the plunge and upgraded to the OZ system. Anita Suennen, the primary user, says Oz is much easier to navigate and yet has all the things they appreciated about OOPS!. . . and more.
A few months ago, they used the OZ inventory update program to complete an inventory of +2 million dollars in parts. When they finished, they found they were off by about .015%. They carry approximately 15,000 different parts in their crib. (These numbers boggle my mind. Can you imagine keeping track of 15,000 different parts!) Anita said the Oz System made the inventory go much easier and allowed them to input more information into their system.
Anita is another user who thinks one of Oz's "great advantage's" is the internal web server which allows all of their Engineers and Supervisors to instantly access Oz to submit work orders from their own computers. The work orders print out immediately at her work station and can be issued to the appropriate tradesmen for completion. She tells us her department has received many favorable comments on the ease of use of this work order system.
Both open and closed work orders can be accessed by the issuer to check on the status, and comments can be added if there is a part on order or some other reason that the completion of the work will be delayed. She said this is a definite asset. Everyone seems to like having this read-only access and there is far less interruption with questions like "Is it done yet?"
According to Anita, "There are so many great functions in OZ it's hard to explain that to someone who hasn't used it. . . The OZ system has been a great tool for our overall Maintenance function."
Ansul is a Division of TYCO and is located in Wisconsin. They make fire extinguishers. For anyone who has doubts, there are still some things "made in America." We saw the fire extinguishers being made from scratch - impressive! We're told that you can find one of Ansul's fire extinguishers in pretty much every McDonald's kitchen.