Greiner Packaging: Maintenance Digital and Mobile

The success story in detail

rePAIR – Greiner's reVOLUTION with a sustainable maintenance solution.

reSPONSIBLE maintenance of Greiner facilities & rePLACEMENT of defective parts with spare parts from stock or on order, using the SRB Maintenance Cockpit.

Greiner Packaging has over 60 years of experience in the development and production of rigid plastic packaging and supplies customers worldwide with innovative and sustainable solutions. Sustainability also means using available tools efficiently. Maintenance plays a crucial role in this. Therefore, it was essential for Greiner Packaging to introduce a company-wide template for planning and executing maintenance, fully integrated into the SAP landscape. The standard tools did not achieve the desired success, so Greiner Packaging turned to SRB for a customised solution. The SRB Maintenance Cockpit delivered exactly what Greiner Packaging aimed for. And Greiner Packaging received more than just additional SAP functionality. The solution ignited the motivation of the entire maintenance team.

The pursuit of excellence is one of the central values at Greiner and its divisions Greiner Packaging, Greiner Bio One, and NEVEON. And that is precisely what wrote the success story of the company. Over its more than 150-year history as a family business in Nürtingen, Germany, Greiner has evolved from a small general store into a globally leading corporate group, with a workforce of over 11,000 employees at more than 120 locations in 34 countries worldwide. Nearly half of the workforce, 5,000 people, work for the packaging division founded 60 years ago.

The pursuit of excellence applies not only to product and quality but also to the machines, tools, and processes that contribute to their production. Roland Schulz ensures excellence in this area. As Global Director Operational Excellence at Greiner Packaging, he is responsible for ensuring that everything runs smoothly in all Greiner Packaging plants worldwide.

In 2022, he focused on maintenance. “We had a simple goal,” explains Roland Schulz. “We wanted to standardise and digitise the maintenance process.” For certain machines at the Greiner Packaging plant in the Czech Republic in Slušovice, there were already digital work plans based on a lean TPM approach, but in most of the other 19 production plants worldwide, maintenance was still a paper and pen process.

Creating Value

Roland Schulz recognised the value that a central digital maintenance solution would create for Greiner Packaging. But there was a catch: it had to be fully integrated into SAP, the standard ERP system of Greiner Packaging for over 20 years. “SAP is the IT backbone of our company. All data, all information is contained there. It was clear that the new solution had to build on that.”

Of course, there were further requirements for the solution. It had to be lean, mobile, and user-friendly, with minimal administrative effort, as the maintenance staff work on mobile devices, adds Roland Schulz.

So Roland Schulz turned to SRB for support, which came through the SRB Maintenance Cockpit. It was developed to manage complete maintenance processes digitally, including work lists, visualisation of checklists and work instructions, as well as reporting messages and disruptions.

Greiner Packaging took advantage of the flexibility of this solution and supplemented the cockpit with two additional applications: a custom tool for maintenance reports and the Fiori-based tool app for monitoring the status of moulds, in other words, a digital solution that broke down the individual process of tool management to smartphone size, as both applications can be used on mobile devices on-site and are connected in real-time with the SAP system.

“The SRB team not only provided excellent advice but also tailored the solution specifically to our needs to achieve transparency and flexibility for high-quality processes, as well as an easy-to-use tool that was crucial for acceptance within our maintenance team,” says Václav Zatloukal, Global Senior Expert ERP Projects & Processes and project manager at the Slušovice site of Greiner Packaging, which served as the pilot plant for the rollout of the SRB Maintenance Cockpit.

Motivation as a Key Factor

To successfully implement the SRB solution, Greiner Packaging had to dive deep into its own processes, question a map of each process, and rework many business-related aspects before they were digitally represented, such as redefining number ranges, order types, error types, and naming conventions. This created the basis for SRB's expertise to tailor the SRB Maintenance Cockpit to Greiner's needs and to represent the entire maintenance execution from A to Z.

But the solution was not just a technical matter when considering configuration, safety regulations, and the like. The biggest challenge that Greiner Packaging had to overcome was communication, recalls Václav Zatloukal: “The shift from remote online meetings to in-person meetings and bi-weekly workshop days on-site not only streamlined the processes but also brought the team members from the Greiner divisions and the maintenance team on board and emotionally committed to the project. When implementing SAP, one often has to keep pushing to get things moving. This time, the team drove the project. The members were extremely motivated and enthusiastic. That made the difference and led to the solution going live earlier than expected.”

Successful Go-live and Big Plans for the Future

Manfred Scheiner, Team Lead Integrated Digital Maintenance at SRB Consulting, confirms: “The close and professional partnership between the teams of Greiner Packaging and SRB paved the way for success.”

The result: On April 11, 2023, exactly 301 days and 5 hours after the first kickoff to the final call, as Manfred Scheiner recalls, and after a final testing phase and key user training, Greiner Packaging successfully went live with the SRB Maintenance Cockpit and the tool app for corrective and preventive maintenance. This means that the entire maintenance process at the Slušovice plant can be handled digitally, saving a lot of time and effort. This implementation now serves as a fundamental template solution for further rollouts within the SAP R/3 landscape of Greiner Packaging in all plants and on the way to SAP S/4HANA in the coming years.

Big Plans for the Future

Roland Schulz summarises the project: “Even though we have now completed the implementation project in Slušovice, it was only the beginning of a long, exciting journey.” The Global Director Operational Excellence at Greiner Packaging has a bright, digital future firmly in sight, foremost the SAP S/4HANA migration project, in which the SRB Maintenance Cockpit is also to be part of the future standard maintenance solution.

In addition, more sensors and measurement points will soon be installed in and around the plants, meaning that Greiner Packaging is on the way to condition-based maintenance based on IoT data such as operating hours.

“Our goal is to fully utilise our IT. The foundation has been laid. Now we must maintain the momentum and ensure that IT brings business value to the entire company,” concludes Roland Schulz.