Customer Case Study - Rexam
The new Rexam Beverage Can Americas Sector consists of the former organization of the American National Can (ANC) in the Americas, which is responsible for manufacturing and marketing beverage can and end sales in North America and South America. The sector headquarter is in Chicago, Illinois. There are 2,500 employees and 23 plants (including two joint ventures).
Rexam is one of the world's top five consumer packaging groups and the world's No 1 beverage can maker. Its global operations focuses on packaging solutions for the beauty, health care, beverage and food industries around the world. In all, the Rexam Group employs some 25,000 people in 35 countries worldwide, and in 1999 had a turnover of around $4,542 million.
Sample Screenshot
REXAM BEVERAGE CAN AMERICAS Delivers the World's Finest Computerized Maintenance Management System Using GuiXT
History was made at Rexam on June 19, 2001! At 6:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, at the Winston-Salem plant in North Carolina, Rexam went live with the Plant Maintenance System. This system allows users to easily keep track of maintenance performed on all of their equipment and spare parts.
About REXAM BEVERAGE CAN AMERICAS
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Rexam Americas is a leading maker of aluminum beverage cans and can ends supplying the major beer and soft drinks brands from a US-wide plant network, as well as plants in Mexico and Brazil. Their customers include Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch, and Coors.
Plant Maintenance
Plant Maintenance comprises of mainly three activities: Inspection, Preventive maintenance and Repair. SAP PM module provides an integrated solution along with other business modules like Material Master, Sales and Distribution and so on. Rexam runs more than 19 plants in US with about 1900 plant floor users. Up time of equipment in plants is very critical for Rexam. Rexam chose SAP’s PM solution to enable them to maintain their equipment and use that data to perform regular preventive maintenance on their equipment.
Challenges
SAP provides very rich functionality in Plant Maintenance. However, due to the complexity of Rexam’s business processes and the SAP screens, it was very challenging to deploy and train the shop floor users. Rexam identified the following challenges to customize PM:
- Multi-transaction business processes. Several of Rexam’s business processes spans through multi-transactions. For example, closing a work order requires the user to create a confirmation, update notification and work order with data such as completed time and then complete the notification and work order. Streamlining these processes significantly reduces training and support, improving data integrity and productivity.
- Complicated and multiple screens/tabs.Complicated and multi-screen transactions meant that more training was required to train users to navigate between those screens (tabs).
- SAP screens peppered with inconsequential fields and buttons.Rexam needed to hide fields, buttons in the toolbar and change the drop down into pushbuttons.
- Imprecise terminology.Industry terminology needed to be used so that the user can better relate to the terms being used.
GuiXT as the Solution
The GuiXT solution presented REXAM with a tremendous opportunity to easily customize and simplify SAP processes without changing ABAP programs. Through the vision of Rexam’s functional team and GuiXT’s flexibility, Rexam was able to deploy SAP at the plant floor level with very little user training.
Solution Overview and Results
Rexam's PM Portal presents users with a portal screen that includes all functions for their day-to-day use. Using PM portal as a launch pad, the plant floor users can create Emergency Work Order or a Maintenance Work Order in less than one minute with few mouse clicks. With one click of a push button a user can quickly view the work that is assigned to him/her. Another button click and the user can view the history for the equipment that he (she) is working on. Armed with this information, users are more proactive than reactive, running all the equipment at their peak performance. The PM portal is customized to serve needs of plant engineers by offering them with different functionality.
SAP PM screens customized in Rexam were developed using Rapid (Iterative) Application Development model. Using GuiXT Designer, a drag and drop tool, development of new screens was quick. Since GuiXT works in tandem with SAP GUI, screens thus customized with GuiXT offers risk free SAP screen customization.
GuiXT by the numbers:
The following table shows a time sample collected for benchmarking purposes. The process in question is creation of Emergency work order:
| Performance Comparison | Before GuiXT | After GuiXT |
| Number of screens | 11 | 4 |
| Time taken to complete a process | Approx. 3 min. | Approx. 40 sec. |
Deployment
Rexam used Citrix Server Environment to distribute PM solution to their end users. Citrix allows Rexam to centrally manage GuiXT and other applications. Combining with Citrix technology, GuiXT enabled a unique printing solution for plant floor users.