CASE STUDY: BACOVA GUILD

The Bacova Guild, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ronile Inc., is one of the country’s largest producers of printed accent rugs, printed floor mats and bathroom ensembles. Bacova currently satisfies the needs of its diverse customer base by offering more than 30 distinct product lines totaling approximately 3,000 unique items.

Bacova Guild, Ltd. has its manufacturing and distribution operations in Low Moor, Virginia, where it recently added 70,000 square feet of distribution space. Bacova and its parent company, Ronile, have combined sales in excess of $120 million.

The Challenge: The Need for More Comprehensive Maintenance Management
For several years, Bacova Guild, Ltd. had been using retail management software, primarily for parts inventory. However, the software did not have full scheduling, work order and reporting capabilities. Bacova was growing and needed a more complete computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).

Burlington Industries, which owned Bacova at that time, had recently launched a massive search for a CMMS. They chose DPSI’s PMC and were recommending it to all their plants.

Jeff Strasser, plant engineer at Bacova says, “There was no need for us to do our own search. I had the greatest amount of confidence in the people we were dealing with at Burlington. If they said PMC was the right program, we didn’t need to look any further.”

Well-Designed PMC Software Makes A Good First Impression
When Bacova purchased PMC, Strasser and his team started entering the data from scratch.

“The IT department had accidentally deleted all the inventory data on the other software, so they weren’t able to import anything,” says Strasser. “But it turned out to be for the best. We took our time analyzing how to enter the information and code it correctly.”

Maintenance shop technician Marty Forbes adds, “We spent about six months getting everything in place before we started using the software on a day-to-day basis. We read the manual and did it all ourselves without help from anyone. The manual covered everything we needed to know.”

“Of course, we’ll never actually be finished setting up the software,” Strasser adds. “An industrial environment like ours is constantly changing. We are constantly adding new things and changing preventive maintenance procedures. As new equipment comes in, it requires new parts and new maintenance schedules. You’re never finished.”

Capitalizing on the Power of PMC
Now Bacova can track all of its preventive maintenance in PMC. Once a week, on Friday, Forbes prints out about 200 pages of work orders for the coming week.

Says Forbes, “The work orders range from tasks as extensive as doing preventive maintenance on a complete production line to making sure that our bottled water cooler gets restocked and cleaned. That cooler is important because we have a very hot environment in one of our work areas and our employees count on it.”

Forklift preventive maintenance is particularly important for Bacova. “We don’t miss any preventive maintenance on our fork trucks,” Strasser says. “We just bought 23 fork trucks and I want them to last for 20 years. Ten years from now I want to be riding those, and I want them to be in good shape. So we want to make sure we PM them as the manufacturer recommends.” For emergency repairs, Bacova mechanics keep a call sheet, a document created in Microsoft Word, in their toolbox. When emergency maintenance needs to be done, mechanics fill out the form, entering the time it took to complete the work, when they finished, and any parts that were used. Forbes converts it into a complete work order in PMC.

Inventory Module Keeps Parts in their Place
Strasser says that one of the main reasons they liked PMC is that it has a very strong inventory control module. “We really needed to get a handle on parts inventory, and PMC does that. When we brought the software on, that’s what we started with first and where we spent most of our time, figuring out how we were going to code things. The last thing we want to have happen is to have a machine shut down for lack of a simple part that we could have had in stock.”

Forbes adds, “Everything that comes in or goes out goes through PMC. Actually, we’re unique in that we don’t have a central storeroom in the plant and we don’t go through a central purchasing department. The maintenance department chooses what to stock and places the orders for parts.”

Once or twice a week, Forbes runs a report to see what parts they need to order. He runs off a list by vendor that shows when parts were last ordered and what price was paid. “We order by vendor, so this makes ordering simpler,” says Forbes.

Complete Reports Keeps Costs in Check
Strasser and Forbes keep PMC’s reporting module busy. At Bacova, the mechanics are accountable for an eight-hour day, and Forbes uses PMC to keep a record of every job they do. “We run a report on each mechanic. How many work orders did he do in a 40-hour week? What is his percent of uptime? If it’s 93 percent, that’s good. If it’s only 80 percent, we wonder what he was doing with the rest of his time.”

Strasser can analyze each piece of equipment to see if it needs to be replaced. “We can print out all the details of maintenance costs and downtime: How much money was spent on maintenance, how much downtime it had, how many man-hours were spent on it. That helps us determine whether it’s worth investing in a new machine or more cost-effective to keep what we have.”

Double Backup Ensures Data Availability
To keep operations running smoothly, Bacova backs up their data twice each day. “We learned the hard way,” explains Strasser. “Earlier this year our backup system went down. We thought IT was working on it; they thought we were. Then we had corrupted data. Without a backup, we lost two months worth of data. Now I back up the system to the server and do a repair and compact every morning as soon as I come in. Everyone knows to not start using PMC until 7:00am, which is when I finish. Then the IT department backs up that server every night. Since I started doing that, everything works perfectly.” That has been their only major problem. “We’ve had fewer than 10 incidents when we needed to call the DPSI support team since we’ve been using the program,” says Strasser. “We're very satisfied with PMC. It does everything we want it to do.”