James Hardie Building Products have really been making their Workmate system work for them in quite incredible ways. Within a short space of time some interesting trends were emerging and their Workmate program provided a simple and effective way to identify and solve problems that had been on-going for some time. Neil Staveley, James Hardie's Mechanical Maintenance Manager selected Workmate because of its simplicity, ease of use and flexibility.

Maintenance down time graph since installation of Workmate Maintenance System

Workmate was first installed with a four seat license in September 1997 but the system has been so successful that an additional four seats have recently been purchased to expand the use of the program. Here is what James Hardie Maintenance Engineers have to say about Workmate.  Workmate is Incredible! An annual saving of $10,000 in maintenance costs is being made and rejects for this part of the production line have been reduced by 80%. The instance revolves around an ongoing problem that has existed with the Trimline machine at James Hardie's Finishing plant in Auckland. A recurring fault has been costing James Hardie a minimum of $10,000 per year for more than 10 years. Within one month of Workmate being installed, it was possible to analyse and determine the real cause of this fault.

The savings have been astounding. The 'fix' cost a total of $500 which includes parts and labour and means that an annual saving of at least $10,000 in maintenance costs is being made. Rejects for this part of the production line have been reduced by 80% making an additional saving in lost production time, rework and increased profitability.

Within one month of implementation Workmate has been responsible for eliminating a problem that has been on- going for more that 10 years.

On an average 10 man hours would be spent per week simply fixing this one aspect of the machine. This has now been reduced to virtually zero hours per week. The Trimline machine has now been running faultlessly for 3 months as a direct result of Workmate being an effective tool to identify this kind of problem.

     The Maintenance Supervisor for the area Bruce Ranby has described Workmate as "incredible" and "Within one month of implementation Workmate has been responsible for eliminating a problem that has been on-going for more that 10 years." The useability and effectiveness of Workmate at a ground floor level has been instrumental in making it possible to collect and analyse this information in order to make these significant gains. This one saving alone is estimated to have paid for the complete installation of the Workmate system.

In addition to the resource of information that has prompted the kind of improvements to one of James Hardie's key departments and critical machines, some other dramatic results have been achieved in overall plant performance as a result of the implementation of Workmate. The Downtime Percentage chart pictured tracks the last eighteen months worth of results based on production time and downtime outages.

Neil Staveley James Hardie's Mechanical Maintenance Manager has been recording this information since November 1996 and the chart shows the dramatic turn of events which has been made possible with the introduction of Workmate. There is always more work to do to maintain a reliable downtime rate and Neil is continuing to 'tweak' his system to stabilise the downtime figures at or below the target value of 2.15% per month.

These results clearly demonstrate the value of Workmate and the results that can be obtained by implementing a straight forward data collection and analysis procedure. The pay-back period for Workmate has been only a few months due to its useability and effectiveness in solving problems. Workmate is owned and operated by the maintenance team and this is also a contributing factor in Workmate's effectiveness as an integral part of the maintenance team's daily routines.