Havco Wood Products LLC Uses eMaint to Slash Downtime and Achieve Over 96% Inventory Accuracy 

Havco is a leading North American manufacturer of oak laminate flooring for trailers, containers, and truck bodies. The company began operations in 1978 in Scott City, Missouri and acquired another manufacturing plant in Vonore, Tennessee in the early 90’s.

Havco prides itself on being an innovator, delivering durable, long-lasting, high-performance truck flooring. To date, the company​ ​has sold millions of laminated oak floors.

Mark Culbertson is the purchasing manager for the Havco facility in Scott City. His team is responsible for managing 500 critical assets, including planers, dryers, gang rip saws, and radio frequency (RF) presses. The facility has over 3,500 stock parts in its system, in addition to its inventory of consumable parts.

Managing the facility’s huge spare parts inventory is a constant challenge. Missing spare parts can lead to unplanned downtime or idling, so the team needed a system to track the location of every spare part and improve the reorder process.

Maintaining the plant’s machinery is another constant challenge. If a critical asset breaks down, the whole operation grinds to a halt, resulting in expensive downtime. The facility needed to find a solution that could increase uptime and productivity.

The Scott City plant initially implemented eMaint more than two decades ago. They originally planned to use the software to handle their inventory and purchasing systems — but over the years, they found even more uses for the program.

The eMaint expansion accelerated when Culbertson started working for Havco in 2018.

Reporting and Data Analytics

Today, the team uses eMaint reporting to track maintenance costs, repair frequency, and overall downtime. As a result, the purchasing and maintenance team get data-driven insights that help them decide when to replace an asset or make repairs. eMaint allows them to see all the relevant data in one place, making decisions easy.

“We can keep track of the charges by asset so that we know when an asset’s starting to cost us more money and it becomes time to replace it,” Culbertson explained.

eMaint’s reporting features also help with long-term inventory planning and forecasting, letting the team know when stocks are getting low and when spending patterns shift.

Work Orders and Inventory Management

eMaint work orders keep the facility at optimal performance, minimizing downtime and boosting overall productivity. eMaint lets users track order completion rates so no job slips through the cracks. Its robust scheduling function makes it easy to set priorities and assign tasks as efficiently as possible.

eMaint automatically adds spare parts requirements to work orders so that crews always show up prepared and keep downtime to a minimum. “That’s the kind of automated feature that makes a huge difference to performance”, Culbertson said. “The automation that we’ve set up within this system is crucial to our success,” he stressed.

Inventory organization has always been a priority for the plant, and in recent years, they have leveraged eMaint to fine-tune their system. They have added photos of each part, eliminated duplicate entries, and created automatic reorders when stock gets low.

Thanks to eMaint, inventory accuracy at Havco now averages over 96% each year. “Anytime you break 95%, you’re doing good,” Culbertson said. “We’ve been at a solid 96% now for several years.”

The plant has significantly reduced its downtime since implementing eMaint. The facility has also lowered its overall costs, thanks to the insights provided by eMaint analytics.

eMaint reporting empowers the maintenance team to monitor machine health and track exactly how much each asset costs the operation. By comparing maintenance costs to productivity, the team can assess the net value of each asset and make smart decisions about when to repair or replace a particular asset.

By taking advantage of eMaint’s automated features, the Scott City facility has also seen dramatic improvements in operational efficiency and an end to the human errors that tend to prolong downtime.

Thanks to eMaint, the facility no longer runs out of spare parts, and maintenance crews have every tool they need when they show up to make repairs. Work orders are completed on time. Plus, the plant’s employees are all actively using eMaint to improve their workflows.

The results have been so valuable that ​Havco’s Vonore, TN purchasing team have also implemented eMaint. They have been successfully utilizing eMaint for over 6 months and have embraced the full functionality of CMMS allowing them to reduce downtime, boost productivity and increase operational efficiency. ​