Customer Reference | TWE Dierdorf GmbH & Co. KG

The TWE site in Dierdorf is one of the key plants within the TWE Group - when looking into the Westerwald‘s production facility, the whole complexity of the manufacturing process becomes obvious. Because not all nonwovens are the same and, depending on the application, fireproof or formable, lightfast or conductive, thick or thin, in wide or narrow webs, sheer size meets technological diversity in Dierdorf. Lines of up to 100 metres in length and four metres in width are partly made up of aggregates from several plant manufacturers.

TWE works with suppliers from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the USA. Analogue plant units are coupled with digital ones - to realise excellent machine availability with low maintenance costs at the same time is a real challenge for TWE. This is a real challenge for the electrical workshop, the locksmith's shop and the technical service at TWE in Dierdorf.

16 years after implementation, Mario Eisen, as a power user from the very beginning, has established the "principle of simplicity" as best practice in the company. Everyone must be able to work with GS-Service in a simple way, in that the tasks set are intuitively comprehensible to everyone. This applies both to the way maintenance activities are carried out and to their documentation. "It has to be self-explanatory what has to be entered."
TWE is pushing the medium of photography of defects and faults. This makes internal work more efficient because it is more effective - but when it comes to documentation, Mario Eisen looks beyond the factory gates: "With GS-Service, we can present maintenance records in text and pictures without any gaps for external audits. This is an invaluable advantage in times when not only independent test centres and certifiers, but also clients, especially from the automotive, hygiene and medical technology sectors, require suppliers to comply with strict standards that extend right into production. Mario Eisen emphasises: "We have thus been able to grow with our challenges, also because we could fall back on valid documentation in the GS system."The electrical workshop, locksmith's shop and technical service at TWE Dierdorf use GS-Service as a "large database in which documents can also be looked up for error analysis," explains Mario Eisen, "via GS-Service, information is also passed on to other shifts."

This, too, is typical of TWE: the philosophy of continuous optimisation includes the claim to use new technology stringently in maintenance and production, if the daily work practice can be made more transparent and resilient with it. Limiting factors such as mental knowledge, time and space - all of which influence the efficiency of an activity - will be addressed by TWE in the foreseeable future with GS-Web. GS-Web is the browser-based application (intranet/internet) for viewing, editing and analysing content from the GS system. Maintenance staff visit a website, log in and start working on a task-defined basis. The new software addresses different stakeholders in the company, including the management level with the possibility of using dashboards. Dashboards are maintenance tachos (KPIs), they graphically prepare key figures on maintenance processes, malfunctions, failures, etc. "It is absolutely advantageous," says GreenGate board member Martin Gerwens, "that TWE has already built a solid foundation with GS-Service and can now move up into another league with GS-Web. Here it is primarily about recording events, i.e. faults, directly at the machine via smartphone or tablet, not afterwards in the foreman's office at the terminal. This also enables well-founded controlling and management in real time, so to speak." The evaluation function in GS-Web shows its strengths especially when it comes to displaying unplanned events on important machines quickly, transparently and comprehensibly.

Of course, the previously fully operational notification service - a kind of shift book via email and Excel - can also be converted to the simpler and less complex web technology in due course. Martin Gerwens continues: "The art is to make it simple. As a rule, this only works if you know what the other person wants and needs. For example, someone who is only on the road to survey defects will not get any other checklists and information played on his tablet. A role-defined interface is wonderfully easy to realise with GS-Web." Mario Eisen also sees GS-Web as a transfer tool for the production employees at TWE in Dierdorf: "They can also feed the system with data, for example, when it comes to what activities they have carried out, such as cleaning certain aggregates".