Delivering bottomline results through smart maintenance

Have you ever wondered why the cost of unnecessary plant maintenance is sometimes as large as your entire plant profit? Running a business these days comes with its own unique challenges and there are many different elements that need to be managed simultaneously.

Today, maintenance is one of the largest controllable expenditures in a plant. Ever wished if you had a business partner who could guarantee a reliable, and efficient plant performance? A partner who can take the full responsibility of your plant maintenance with clear accountability so that you can focus on your business’ core strengths.

The concept of strategic maintenance partnership is quite prevalent in mature markets like Europe and the Americas, where the intent for most companies is to focus entirely on capitalising their core business and products while entrusting the care of their manufacturing assets to the industry experts. These partnership agreements are developed on performance-based models to derive a win-win situation for both customers and the service providers. This approach creates better transparency in tracking the equipment performance and maintenance spend/ton. The adaptation of these models can now be seen in emerging markets like China and India, and the same wave has reached the middle eastern market as well. Outsourcing non-core activities is not something new for this market as we can see companies are already practicing this in areas like facility management, housekeeping, security, etc. However, industrial maintenance is one area that is yet to be widely explored.

By establishing its regional office in the UAE in mid-2015, Quant decided to explore this potential marketspace wherein the experience of managing more than 300 industrial plants worldwide can be brought in to help customers in this region realise better returns from their capital employed.

As the discussions continue, more and more companies have started realising the fact that although the maintenance function is extremely important and was once considered an integral part of their business, it is not the reason why customers buy their products.

They feel management resource and time should be better utilised to focus on their operations, marketing, expansions and in new product development, leaving maintenance to professional companies who can do it better and be more cost-effective than themselves. Currently, Quant has more than 80 partnership agreements in 30 countries, employing nearly 3,000 maintenance professionals, of which 130 technical specialists are based in the UAE.

Could you elaborate on Quant’s range of services and solutions? What are its areas of expertise and how would you describe the value proposition the company offers?

Lack of good maintenance practices is costing companies millions of dollars in capital expenditure, employing and retaining a multitude of expensive high-skilled resources, acquiring sophisticated maintenance tools etc.

Our Value Proposition is Smart Maintenance, which is a way of combining employee knowledge, leading processes and methodologies, world-class safety stewardship and a tailored digital platform. Our approach appeals to senior management who are looking for a strategic shift in their operations by leveraging on the experience and expertise of an external service provider through a performance-based partnership without the need of any additional investment.

Please tell us about Quant’s presence in the UAE and the Gulf. What are the sectors and industries you have been working with in the region?

Quant is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden and has its regional office in the UAE, in Dubai. In a short span of time, we were able to secure long-term partnerships with customers from the aluminium, glass and utilities sectors. At all our sites we have a full-time maintenance crew who are responsible for the design, management, planning and execution of all the maintenance activities 24×7.

As we meet with prospects from various industries like metals, food and beverage, discrete manufacturing, etc a growing interest is witnessed in our strategic business model.

To reinforce the confidence in our prospects we take them to our reference sites and make them interact with our customers and employees so that they can get a deeper understanding of our site operating model. To determine the possible business case, our experts conduct a systematic feasibility study followed by a due diligence and value proposal presentation.

What measures do you take to uphold quality and safety standards as well as maintain optimal efficiency for your projects?

For us, safety always comes first. Safety, together with people empowerment build the core foundation of Quant’s business strategy.

We continuously measure safety aspects at our customer sites, improve and refine safety protocols, and train our people to be safety leaders. In addition, we maintain a Quant knowledge portal and Quant academy to constantly update our team members with the latest technologies in the industrial maintenance world. We also conduct site assessments and benchmarking exercises using our regional/global execution centre teams. This is our way of ensuring an efficient implementation of our partnership model at our customer sites and building a sustainable business. Customer satisfaction initiatives are rolled out at regular intervals and feedback is obtained through surveys, which helps us to consistently improve on our deliverables. We are also certified to the latest versions of the International standards such as ISO 9001:2015, ISO 45001:2018 & ISO 55001:2014 in the Middle East.

How does Quant view the Arabian Gulf market? What are the potential areas of growth and what are your long-term plans for the UAE and wider region?

The UAE is a fast-emerging economy with its prestigious infrastructure developments and strong business fundamentals. Government fiscal stimuli aimed at infrastructure and industrial investments, as well as business-friendly reforms are attracting foreign direct investment into this market.

In an ever-demanding business environment a reliable partnership with us can introduce smart concepts and business transformation strategies that would help companies sustain and expand their market share while protecting their profitability. We also have a plan to replicate the SMASh project, an academic collaboration around Smart Maintenance, where we have collaborated with various companies and universities to enable digitalisation of the Swedish manufacturing industry.