Valmet Customer Story

Finnish supplier to the paper-making industry, Valmet, got complete control of its tooling inventory and consumable items, slashing losses by 50%. The other benefits had a profound effect on different departments.

CRIBWISE inventory-management software saves Valmet team eight hours a week and cuts use of consumables by 50% 

Client objective 

Valmet is a Finnish stock-listed company with head office in Espoo, Finland and supplier to the paper-making industry. The company needed an efficient and easy-to-install software solution to manage its inventories of tools and consumable items at its facility in Karlstad. The company had suffered problems with its previous inventory-management system, which forced it to fall-back on pen-and-paper-based manual systems—costing it both time and money.  

Background 

Valmet’s flexible paper-making technology enables the sustainable manufacture of a wide variety of paper goods, from plain tissues to high-quality textured and structured tissue products. Karlstad is one of Valmet’s roll-service workshops and offers a wide range of rolling services, with a focus on grinding. The workshop also performs mechanical maintenance on rolls for paper mills. To carry-out this work, the facility uses a range of re-usable tooling and consumable items, such as personal protective equipment (PPE). When Valmet Karlstad’s legacy system for managing these inventories failed, it reverted to a manual approach that was time-consuming, imprecise and inefficient.  

The CRIBWISE solution 

CRIBWISE proposed its modern, intelligent inventory-management software, which would give Valmet Karlstad complete control over its inventories of tooling and consumable items. The CRIBWISE system took just five weeks to set-up and currently manages approximately 700 items of stock across two departments: 

• The machine shop, where the CRIBWISE system is deployed in conjunction with two hardware enclosures that store critical tooling. Approximately 25 transactions a week are logged through this system.  
• In-house logistics, where the CRIBWISE system is used without hardware to manage the storage and distribution of consumable items, such as hand tools, gloves, articles of clothing, oils and lubricants, and chemicals. This entire department is currently managed through an easy-to-use portable hand-scanner running CRIBWISE, but the software will soon be deployed in combination with a recently installed Kardex storage system. 

Among other benefits, the solution provided to the company by CRIBWISE cut the time needed to manage Valmet’s inventory by eight hours a week and slashed the consumption of certain consumable items by approximately 50%. 

The results 

Valmet Karlstad found the integration of CRIBWISE into its operations extremely easy. Its operatives started small, adding a few stock items at a time as their confidence in the system grew. A year later, and the use of CRIBWISE has had a profound effect on the efficiency of the two departments. 

Firstly, CRIBWISE has eliminated about eight hours a week of manual labour for the operatives running them.  

In the machine shop, tools are now tracked from their point of origin to their point of use on the shop floor, meaning that they can no longer go missing and will always be available for business-critical jobs.  

Marcus Olsson, Warehouse and Tools Technician says, ‘We started using CRIBWISE about a year ago and right now we have approximately 700 items that we can pick and restock when they get to critical levels. It’s a great solution for us and has made my job much easier.   It’s easy to use, has a simple interface and it’s really saved me a great deal of time. We couldn’t do without it now and we are adding more and more items each month.’ 

In the logistics department, the adoption of CRIBWISE has reduced wastage and prevented consumable items from being used for unauthorised purposes—saving time and money. Indeed, it has cut the use of gloves by approximately 50%. It has also reduced the amount of stock being held on shelves by a significant amount.  

For both departments, CRIBWISE now orders stock items automatically when they are needed, meaning that the time-consuming task of raising purchase orders for these items no longer needs to be carried out. The receiving of these items is also now automated.  

Given that only about 5% of the stock is owned by Valmet, with the balance owned by suppliers until it is used, the CRIBWISE system reduces the cost of ownership of these items and improves stock-control for both Valmet Karlstad and the companies that sell products to it.  

8 hours a week less of manual labour 

Consumables reduced by 50%

Automated stock ordering 

The future 

Valmet Karlstad now plans to increase the number of stock items managed by CRIBWISE to over 1000 and to make it accessible to operatives working on the shop floor. It also plans to use the system to manage the maintenance and calibration of some of its tools, such as torque wrenches and measuring tools (some of which cost as much as SEK50,000 to recalibrate). Using their legacy system, it was easy to lose track of when these tasks were to be conducted.  

Overall, the management of Valmet Karlstad has been so impressed with the results achieved with CRIBWISE that they have demonstrated it to executives from the wider company with a view to rolling it out at other Valmet locations.  

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