Liberty Safe
Liberty Safe boosts production by revolutionizing its spare parts management and preventive maintenance programs.
Introduction
Liberty Safe is the largest manufacturer of home and gun safes in the United States. Having been in business for over thirty years, they credit their continued success to the quality and durability of their products, which are built to last through fires, floods, and other extremes.
Their maintenance team is responsible for maintaining the production equipment and the seven acre facility where each step of fabrication and assembly happens.
The Challenge
Adam Ferran, Maintenance Manager for Liberty Safe had previously managed maintenance tasks by routing paperwork and assigning tasks to team members on a pegboard. While it got the job done, it was a time-intensive process that was built around reactive maintenance.
“Manually coordinating tasks would consume two to three hours of my day or more if there was an equipment failure,”
Adam Ferran, Maintenance Manager
Which there frequently was. Equipment downtime occurred regularly which disrupted production operations and diverted the maintenance team away from their goal of transitioning to a more proactive strategy.
Ferran saw spare parts as the root source of many of their challenges. The lack of an accurate inventory system made it difficult to get downed machines back up and running quickly. They would sometimes spend hours in their spares room looking for a part and they would frequently place overnight parts orders to get a critical machine back up and running. As a result, the team spent thousands on expedited shipping every week, repairs took longer than necessary, and efforts to implement preventive maintenance failed to gain traction.
The Solution
Ferran’s experience taught him to tackle the issue at the root source – in this case, spare parts. They began looking for software that could help them create an accurate parts inventory, forecast parts needs, and streamline reordering so that critical parts were always available and easy to find. This would help them support a preventive maintenance program that could boost the organization’s output.
Overall, their list of needs was focused on these fundamentals:
- Spare parts inventory management and forecasting
- Preventive maintenance scheduling and planning
- Data insights on downtime and maintenance costs
- Increased visibility for management and production teams
The team shopped around and received demonstrations of several different CMMS solutions. They chose Limble because it offered the functions they needed, was easy to use, and provided great customer service.
They started by logging their most critical spare parts into Limble, carefully noting the inventory location and attaching them to relevant assets in the system. Within 90 days, they began to see impressive results.
“Our expedited shipping costs started to decrease within 90 days of implementation and within 180 days they were almost eliminated completely. All because we were able to manage parts better in Limble.”
Adam Ferran, Maintenance Manager
The Results
The team is accumulating enough data in Limble to begin informing annual maintenance plans and other activities that directly prevent downtime. The future for Liberty Safe is predictive maintenance which will provide them with even more productivity gains.
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Spare parts management
The earliest wins the Liberty Safe team experienced was in their spare parts room. Being able to locate parts instantly and trust what their inventory was telling them motivated the maintenance team to dig in deeper with Limble. “Our shipping costs for parts have gone down dramatically, at least 75%. It is all because we now know when we’ll be using parts, so we order them in advance. We know when to reorder. And it is all based on the Limble parts system,” says Ferran.
Increased productivity
As downtimes got shorter and less frequent, productivity went up. Eventually, it wasn’t just the maintenance team that was noticing the results. Everyone from upper management to the production line could feel the difference.
“Downtime on our water jets has gone down 75%. Even our Board of Directors has noticed the results.”
Adam Ferran, Maintenance Manager
Their improved spare parts system enabled them to transition to a strong preventive maintenance program, reducing downtime dramatically and ultimately increasing the productivity of the entire operation by over 35%. They now have their sights set on predictive maintenance as their vision for the future to further improve output.
Cost savings and collaboration
Limble’s cost-saving features have brought the maintenance and accounting departments at Liberty Safe closer together. Ferran can easily and accurately show where maintenance resources are going and how much is being saved, making budgeting a much easier and more accurate process. “We can inform accounting and our CFO exactly how much money we’re going to spend on preventive maintenance parts. We can drive it to the dollar and end up being within our budget, which is unheard of,” says Ferran.
``Limble has made capital requests for new equipment more effective because now we can show - with data - the average equipment lifespan and what parts, consumables, and man hours have gone into maintaining an asset.``
Adam Ferran, Maintenance Manager
Team morale and workload
There are also improvements in the less tangible aspects of maintenance work. Prior to Limble, maintenance team members never knew what they would be walking into when they arrived at work. Ferran, who used to work 70-80 hour weeks is now down to 50 hours per week with much less stress about what is awaiting him when he arrives. “Limble has made a huge difference for morale because we’re not walking into a fire every day,” he says.
The team impact extends beyond the maintenance department to support a key aspect of their core values of being a producer of American-made products and an employer of local workers. As Ferran explains, “We have 300 people here who rely on a paycheck but we used to send them home when production went down. We don’t have to do that anymore because Limble has helped us manage the proper PMs and keep parts on hand. It has impacted the entire facility.”