Improving Maintenance Safety with Automated Work Order Packet Printing

The Company

Graymont is North America’s second-largest supplier of lime and lime-based products with facilities across the United States and Canada and has a significant investment in Grupo Calidra, the largest lime producer in Mexico. Graymont also produces construction materials under its Materials Group operation.

The Problem

Graymont uses JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Capital Asset Management module (JDE CAM) for maintenance planning and scheduling. From this module, planners and schedulers print work orders for maintenance teams making repairs and doing preventative work.

Because JD Edwards only supports printing for the first text-based attachment associated with a work order, printing additional attachments requires users to open and print attachments in their native applications. This lengthy, inefficient process discourages users from attaching files at all, which is a real problem when safety documents are involved with a job. The result was a chaotic, error-prone, and unorganized process that involved multiple people working in multiple locations to produce a complete work order packet.

Considerable time and effort could be saved if this tedious process could be automated while also improving efficiency and enhancing safety initiatives.

The Solution

Bernard Lague and Iara Ramanauskas, both Graymont Maintenance Support team members, had been looking for an automated printing solution for quite some time. Then, Iara met STR Software at an Oracle Maintenance Summit event. After thorough research, Graymont chose AventX for JD Edwards CAM because it met the business requirement to print all associated attachments with a work order automatically. Graymont also learned that AventX could include image files like .tif and .jpg without leaving JDE. Needing exceptional support, Graymont also purchased STR Software’s premium maintenance support service.

The training was minimal, as the printing process for the planners and schedulers is virtually unchanged; only now, with AventX, all the attachments are printed and collated with the correct work order. This new automation greatly reduces the resources and time involved in assembling work order packets and improves wrench time for maintenance technicians.

Even before AventX was fully installed, Graymont began structuring its safety program around the ability to attach safety-related documents to work orders. Since AventX requires minimal manual involvement and supports version-controlled attachment retrieval, Graymont now feels confident that each work order packet contains the correct information to keep technicians safe on the job. According to Iara, the biggest improvement is the ability to “have the correct information ready to go at a moment’s notice, whether a work order needs to include parts lists, pictures of what has to be fixed, or lockout/tagout procedures. It’s a big plus because now people will actually be using the correct versions of the attachments.”