Success at Swedish brewing giant Spendrups Bryggeri depends to a large extent on production reliability: any equipment failure can directly impact the brewing process and ability to deliver to customers, as well as affecting longer-term costs, efficiency, and waste. In addition, the company is committed to long-term sustainability and carbon neutrality, and progress towards these goals relies on continuous process improvements.

With a 80-person maintenance team, Spendrups wanted to allocate resources effectively to ensure maximum production reliability. Yet maintenance based on schedules could lead staff to spend energy and effort on well-functioning machines while other systems might be left without the urgent attention they needed.

Fredric Melin, Maintenance Manager at Spendrups, comments, “I knew from previous experience that there was a better way to schedule and manage the maintenance of machinery. We looked to transform our working practices to enable proactive, condition-based maintenance, and then move to predictive maintenance as soon as possible. We aimed to significantly improve production reliability, which in turn would improve efficiency and contribute directly to our sustainability goals.”

The Spendrups team turned to Enfo, an IBM Platinum Business Partner, to help map out the idea and create the journey. Enfo specializes in information management, helping companies to exploit data to develop more intelligent operations.

“We knew that our preventive maintenance was not at the level we wanted, and our existing technology did not have the functionality we wanted,” says Melin. “With expert assistance from Enfo, we completed an audit of our current practices and looked at opportunities for improvement. We chose to totally revise our way of working, and consequently looked for a solution that could support us on our journey.”

Spendrups started the journey by implementing IBM Maximo Manage, Mobile and Scheduler solutions and embarking on company-wide training. Across three sites, the maintenance team focused on establishing new, shared, standardized working practices, and on learning how to gain the greatest advantage from the Maximo software. Enfo provided guidance on how to deploy and configure Maximo to enable standardized operations across the company, based on experience gained during multiple successful implementations.

Starting the journey towards a new set of best practices relied on both staff engagement and the deployment of Maximo. Essentially, the working methodologies and the Maximo solutions are working hand-in-hand as Spendrups transforms its maintenance programs.

“In the past, for example, I could say that there were production impacts caused by equipment reliability, but found it difficult to see or understand where those impacts were coming from because of a lack of data,” says Melin. “But simply changing systems does not change reality, and it was essential to adopt a new mindset, with condition-based preventive maintenance as our best practice.”

Spendrups has invested in modern production equipment, which provides comprehensive performance data. “We certainly possessed the data, and Maximo is the right platform to help us capture and exploit it,” reports Melin. “For the first time, with Maximo we have established a strategic platform to help us analyze this wealth of information and direct our maintenance teams as effectively as possible.”

Thanks to the Maximo technologies, Spendrups now creates maintenance schedules built on actionable data collected from production equipment, helping the team to improve reliability by addressing the most urgent work as a priority. From simple alerts, such as a machine reporting a blocked filter, to complex performance trend analysis, Spendrups can take positive maintenance actions based on real-world data.

Spendrups is committed to carbon neutrality and sustainable production, which – in an energy-intensive business – provides additional challenges. Ensuring that all equipment functions reliably and optimally helps to drive efficiency, through reduced power consumption and lower environmental impact.

Thanks to the data-driven planning and scheduling capabilities of IBM Maximo, Spendrups can retain a lean, highly skilled team to maintain its production equipment in peak condition. Machine lifespans are extended, which reduces the need for new capital investments and contributes to the company’s sustainability objectives.

Maximo Mobile, for example, enables field technicians to access critical data such as asset histories and operational data while onsite, increasing productivity and helping them to solve issues more quickly. Spendrups also plans to deploy Maximo Monitor, which offers remote asset monitoring powered by artificial intelligence that can identify, highlight and analyze operational anomalies at scale.

As Spendrups continues to deploy additional Maximo applications and collects more data, predictive accuracy will improve. Technicians will gain greater insight into operational data, and be able to complete a greater proportion of work onsite without the need to return to base, while the company will see improvements in reliability and performance attributable to enhanced asset management.

“In some ways we were ‘blind’ before. Now with Maximo, the technicians know that the maintenance tasks they perform are genuinely making a difference, helping us intervene proactively to run reliable, efficient, sustainable operations,” remarks Melin.

Enfo has helped Spendrups to build business intelligence dashboards using data from Maximo to measure results and process behaviors.

“With ongoing support and advice from Enfo and continuous team training, Maximo is enabling our journey towards much more efficient, reliable operations. Ultimately, predictive maintenance, potentially powered by artificial intelligence, will transform our capabilities, and we are excited by the opportunities and possibilities enabled by Maximo.”

The family-owned Spendrups Bryggeri, founded in 1897, forms the largest brewery and beverage group in Sweden. The company operates three breweries, employs about 1,100 people, and generates sales of approximately €380 million (2020). 

Enfo (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a Nordic IT services company that helps enterprises achieve their data-driven business transformation goals. Employing more than 800 people, Enfo has over 350 customers across various industries. It offers services around digital trust, data and analytics, applications, integration, cloud platforms, and managed services.