Major Mine Increases Maintenance Efficiency with Automated Work Order Package Printing in JD Edwards CAM

The Company

KGHM International Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of KGHM Polska Miedz S.A., is a major global copper producer. Focused on growth in copper, silver, and other metals, KGHM operates mines and processing facilities in four (4) countries—Canada, Chile, Poland, and the United States.

The Problem

KGHM uses the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Capital Asset Management (JDE E1 CAM) module for maintenance planning and scheduling. From this module, planners and schedulers print work orders for maintenance teams making repairs and doing preventative work.

During the company’s Sudbury plant implementation of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0 in June 2012, challenges arose with some of the ERP’s native functionality. Following best practice, Sudbury had associated documents with each of their preventative maintenance work orders—text files, images, diagrams, and other attachments—that provide detailed instructions. Despite the smooth implementation, the planners and schedulers had an unresolved significant business requirement: easily creating and distributing work orders and their associated attachments in one collated packet. JDE E1 CAM prints work orders and their first text attachment, but the other attachments have to be opened separately in their native viewers (e.g., Microsoft Word, Adobe Reader, etc.) and then printed and collated manually. This lengthy and cumbersome process was a detriment to efficiency, something KGHM constantly works to improve as a key part of its overall asset reliability strategy.

The Solution

When Darcy Bains, Manager of Enterprise Applications at KGHM, met STR Software at an Oracle event in May 2012, he was excited to hear about their initiative to automate work order packet printing for JDE E1 CAM. Though the product, AventX for JD Edwards CAM, was still in development, KGHM agreed to beta-test the software. This arrangement allowed KGHM to determine if the solution fulfilled their needs while also assisting STR Software in fine-tuning the product after seeing it work in a real-world, dynamic JDE E1 CAM environment.

KGHM had a business requirement to print the first text attachment associated with a work order, which JDE E1 CAM can do; however, it cannot preserve any of the attachment’s formatting. With AventX for JD Edwards CAM, users were able to print all attachments, regardless of file format *and* preserve all formatting–all without ever leaving JDE E1 CAM. They were also able to print attachments from anywhere within their corporate environment: JDE database, network servers, SharePoint, or from a URL. No training was required since the process for the end user was exactly the same as it always had been.

After just one month of using the solution in production, Terri Vial, Maintenance Business Analyst at KGHM stated, “Printing with AventX is saving each planner the equivalent of seven weeks per year, and we have six planners at the Sudbury plant. That equals forty-two weeks per year; almost the same as saving a full salary for another person!” And, since less manual involvement is required and version-controlled attachment retrieval is supported, KGHM can feel confident that each work order packet is correct, complete, and ready to go at a moment’s notice. This also increases wrench time, advancing the company up the Maintenance Excellence Pyramid.

After the initial success at Sudbury, KGHM implemented AventX for JD Edwards CAM at its additional sites and plants.