For over 20 years, Van Parijs Engineering has been providing customized solutions in the areas of power quality and energy. Thanks to their expertise in UPS and CHP systems, Van Parijs guarantees the quality of your energy supply under all circumstances.
Their mission is to develop high quality, reliable and sustainable energy solutions and to help the customers in their energy transition by securing and improving their energy needs. To do this, Van Parijs Engineering, now part of Luminus Solutions, provides customized B2B solutions in 2 areas: decentralized energy production and uninterruptible power supply
Problem
Van Parijs Engineering provides customized energy solutions to customers. These customers have one thing in mind: make sure the investment in this energy solution gives the projected return on investment. This means that the energy production needs to be regular and continuous. It almost works like a “negative contract”. It costs money to Van Parijs when the machine is not running as it should. So preventive maintenance is key.
At the same time, each energy production solution is customized. Not two installations are the same, so the maintenance isn’t a matter of one process fits all On the contrary, each cogeneration plant needed a specific maintenanc schedule.
Solution
Enters Odyssee Field Service. Because every installed energy solution is different, giving all the specs to the field engineer was important. “The custom fields to build a spec sheet for each equipment type was a first step. All relevant information is now available to technicians in a structured way on the mobile app, also when offline. But we needed more,” says Gregory Duquennois, Maintenance Manager Energy at Van Parijs Engineering. “So we started to use the ‘Bill of Material’ module available inside Odyssee Field Service. With this module, field engineers know exactly how the equipment was built and what spare parts to use. We can track how fast and how much a part has been replaced. After all, the more hours the energy production machine runs, the happier the customer.”
Being able to track the used parts against a Bill of Material is essential too. It allows the engineers to understand why an equipment fails and which part is responsible for it. A field engineer may use a different air filter than originally required. But if it turns out this air filter keeps the equipment running for longer, it is an important feedback.
Maintenance schedules
A second key element, was to be able to setup flexible preventive maintenance schedules. “Our cogeneration plants usually have a maintenance schedule that ressembles this structure,” says Gregory Duquennois, “for example a monthly small maintenance + one larger maintenance every 3 months + one very big maintenance every 2 years.”
The contract module allows to build as many preventive maintenance schedules for each equipment as one needs, with its specific list of recommended parts and checklist. Once set up, it generates the work orders and puts them on the plan board automatically, never missing a single maintenance.
“The checklist module has really been instrumental to us. This is where we gained a huge benefit”
Gregory Duquennois
Maintenance Manager Energy
Checklists
Because every cogeneration plant is customized, Van Parijs needed customizable work instructions or checklists. Although the plants could be divided into 3 categories, even than each plant requires a specifically tailored checklist and procedure per maintenance stage. Odyssee Field Service allows this flexibility.
Based on the feedback of the field technicians, checklists could be shaped per equipment to really optimize the maintenance processes, resulting in more running hours per plant.
Return on investment
For Gregory Duquennois, the Odyssee solution allowed Van Parijs Engineering to enter the digital era. All the paper work and tedious after hours administration was cut out. This resulted in an increased capacity. The same field engineers could now spend more time on maintenance, doing more plants on a monthly basis. This reduced the downtime by 9%!
Van Parijs also hugely gained in flexibility. Even if sending the same technician to the usual plants stays a good practice, given the detailed checklists, any technician can now be scheduled on any plant.
