Our organization is a 5 year old, 100 million-gallon/year fuel Ethanol Production plant in the Midwest. We operate our plant safely and at full capacity. We are always looking for ways to improve and increase our capabilities for production. Part of this process is to have the tools necessary to keep the plant operating at peak efficiency as much as possible. The CMMS software we were using prior to eRPortal was insufficient because there was no flexibility to allow customer requested changes to better track and document maintenance actions, change assets as equipment is removed or installed, and manage data required for company KPI's. The data was hard to get out of the system once it was put in and difficult to navigate overall. Since our company was looking for a better way to manage these maintenance actions and decrease downtime, we decided to search for a new CMMS system that could fit our needs. We looked at several different programs and decided to purchase eRPortal version 4.21 in April of 2011. Due to the flexibility of the program to change and adapt based on the users needs, the value of the program itself, and annual maintenance costs. The implementation went very well. Pertinent data was recovered from the old system and loaded into our eRPortal server and we received onsite training to learn how to use and manipulate the program. We ran both old and new systems for about one month before we abandoned the old and moved forward with the new. We have been happy ever since. I have to say that as expected with any new program or piece of equipment, we did run into a few problems that had to be resolved, but the eRPortal support was outstanding. We have already requested many modifications to our program to fit our needs, and they are always there to listen. They meet every need in a timely manner with the utmost professionalism and expertise. In the 11 months we have had eRPortal, we have increased the effectiveness of our maintenance program by 100%, reduced downtime on equipment by 60 %, and are able to more effectively track our KPI with greater ease than ever before. We have also tied in eRPortal to our DCS system historian and are now capable of having work orders automatically generate when there is a system parameter that is outside of predetermined normal operating limits. No more need to rely on the operators to pass on to maintenance the next morning that something wasn’t working right... it is already in the work order que. We have also trained our operations personnel to use the program allowing greater and effective communications of issues and timely reporting. We are currently looking to have eRPortal interface with other programs, such as our Regulatory Compliance program to meet the needs of our OSHA directed Process Safety Management system, and also to interface with our Predictive Maintenance vendors program to automatically upload PdM data into the asset's history files. This program was the right choice for us! Not too big, not too small, very adaptable, flexible, and easy to use. We are currently working to install this program into our two other plants and hope to have it implemented by the summer of 2012. It is an awesome program!

eRPortal CMMS at TenCate Geosynthetics

Pros

Easy to use. All functionality is at your control. It interfaces with SCADA systems for real-time conditions-based maintenance and equipment monitoring.

Cons

We find it difficult to use the mobile module. We have tried several devices in the past here, and they were all operational but not consistent from a user point of view. The best option we have found is using the full version of eRPortal on a tablet with Windows.