Crown Cork & Seal operates 16 beverage packaging facilities across the U.S., producing around 2,000 cans per minute nationwide.

Crown Cork & Seal first contacted eMaint back in 2005. At the time, its main priority was managing spare parts inventory. By the time Sander Le, Engineering Manager, started working for Crown in 2009, the inventory system was running smoothly. But Le had a bigger vision of what Crown could accomplish using eMaint to its full capacity.

Crown Cork and Seal operated for almost 133 years without deviating from established in-house practices. Naturally, maintenance technicians and supervisors were somewhat reluctant to make changes. “It’s like herding cattle,” said Le. “I let them roam around in this big field for a long time, but now I need to figure out how to get all of them moving in the same direction quickly.”

Electrical engineers Sander Le and David Johnson outlined the key challenges teams faced.

• Lack of standardization and spare parts sharing: Even though it worked well on a plant level, inventory wasn’t standardized, and there wasn’t an easy way to monitor non-local sites. Part requests involved making phone calls and lengthy storeroom searches. Each site had its respective eMaint account and worked with it differently, so they were siloed and separated. “We can no longer afford to run independently as we have,” said Le. “We need to find cost-cutting measures when buying and using spare parts.”
• Trusting the process: Concerned that it could take time from maintenance tasks, technicians and plant workers were skeptical about adopting a new CMMS system. “I’m asking them to learn a new system, log in, track everything…it’s completely foreign to them. It’s a challenge,” said Le.
• Insufficient reporting: Crown Cork & Seal has always used paper records, but reliance on paper limited its view of maintenance history. “The biggest issue we have with paper is once you fill it out, it goes in a bin and you never look at it again,” said Le. “Nobody’s analyzing that piece of paper for trends.”
• Downtime: For a company that produces 2,000 cans per second, equaling six million cans per day, “Every minute of downtime counts, it’s that fast paced,” said Le. Using eMaint to schedule PMs and improve maintenance tracking would allow maintenance teams to stay ahead of the curve instead of fighting fires. “We’ve been a reactive company,” Le said. “We’re telling our team we cannot keep doing that for the future.”

With a clear vision of company goals and a plan to achieve them, Crown Cork & Seal began preparing for eMaint standardization across its plants. “We built it in silos, as 16 different units,” said Le. “But from where I stand, we can work as one.”

In the meantime, Crown also worked with an eMaint Customer Success Manager while building four new factories, learning new ways to use eMaint while involving the maintenance team in the building phase.

Building on 20 years of successful eMaint utilization, Crown Cork & Seal is tapping into even more of the system’s capabilities to enhance maintenance processes.

• $1 million saved: In recent years, Crown built several new plants, and eMaint provided tools to produce and verify significant cost savings in a single build. Spare parts are purchased and used while plants are being built, and eMaint enabled the teams to check what was used and for what assets. This helped Crown avoid purchasing duplicate parts, saving it $1 million.
• Optimized maintenance scheduling: Instead of fighting fires, the Crown maintenance teams use eMaint to schedule PMs and boost uptime. “We’re getting ahead of the curve by planning our downtime so we can run for the next 30 days without breakdowns,” said Johnson.
• Global parts storeroom: Many of Crown’s plants use the same assets and parts, some costing as much as $150,000. Instead of every plant carrying a full spare parts inventory, technicians can easily search with eMaint to find and share parts stored at any location. eMaint reports also show how often parts are needed, helping teams optimize storerooms and cut costs by only buying and storing necessary parts.
• Enterprise-level reporting: Digitized record-keeping and eMaint-generated reports put real-time data within reach. “Corporate management wants to know, are we running well or not? We can’t answer that question with paper records. But we can do it with eMaint,” said Le.
• Time savings: Technicians have maintenance records at their fingertips, saving time during PMs and repairs. “I can look at a PM from five years ago and see what parts we used and how many man-hours it took,” explains Johnson. “I don’t have to re-plan every job; I can go back and use eMaint to save time.”

As the maintenance teams see more and more benefits from using eMaint, they’re beginning to welcome it. “They’re seeing its value at the plant level. Not just financially, but personally too,” said Johnson. “You don’t want to keep running your guys into the ground fighting fires. You want to get ahead of it.”

Crown continues to expand its use of eMaint to boost PM completion rates, streamline maintenance operations, and tap into even greater value from the CMMS it has trusted for over 20 years.

Johnson, Crown Cork & Seal, Inc.