The Company
Headquartered in Chicago, US Gypsum (USG) serves construction markets around the world with wall, ceiling, flooring, sheathing, and roofing products that enable customers to build the outstanding spaces where people live, work and play. Their network of plants, mines, quarries, and other facilities includes 49 manufacturing locations and 6,900 employees across North America.
The Challenge
US Gypsum generated a lot of paperwork from their MP2 Maintenance Planning program. To ease the load of paper processing, they began looking for an easy way to capture data from feedback forms for their maintenance program and have the data automatically feed into that program. Normally, this kind of work would take hours of manual data entry by several people to update the feedback section of MP2. This paperwork also needed to be stored and held for historical purposes for any future audits that may come from US Gypsum’s corporate office. USG needed a way to access these copies easily in the event of an audit, or simply to look back at the original document to see the comments that the maintenance person filled in. These comments were handwritten and couldn’t be read automatically by an automated process.
The Solution
Keymark helped USG develop a feedback form containing boxes that maintenance workers fill in when they complete a work order. Then, Keymark worked to create a template that reads the data from the boxes and converts the needed data into a text file. From there, they developed a process that would take that text file and put the data into a specific table in USG’s MP2 program. This table allows them to import the data and associate it with the work order that it’s assigned to. By utilizing OnBase and Kofax Capture, USG was able to convert written data into electronic data to populate their MP2 automatically.
USG also had a need to maintain a copy of the original feedback form so that it could be used in future audits or to look at historical records based on each piece of equipment. OnBase now stores and maintains that historical record in a SQL database. In order for their maintenance planners to view this history, KeyMark and USG set up a webserver to connect with an Application Enabler. This software will look at a specific field on our MP2 Work order page and allows the planner to call up the historical “digital hardcopy” of the record. By having an electronic copy of the record, USG no longer had to maintain thousands of paper records, and were able to recycle all of the feedback forms that were left in a hard copy format.
The Results
Since utilizing intelligent automation to update their processes, US Gypsum has seen excellent results.
I would say that the greatest impact to our productivity would be the ease of entering the records. Instead of having several people spending half of their day entering countless feedback, we can have one person handle the feedback records for each of our three planners. This person is responsible for the scanning and verification of the accuracy of the feedback forms when they are entered. It would take 10-15 minutes per feedback form for someone to manually enter a single record into the feedback section of our MP2 program. By utilizing the solution that was developled, an operator can enter feedback for hundreds of records in about 15-20 minutes. We have a dedicated operator that enters multiple batches per day from each our three Maintenance Planners. This also allows her to double check the data for errors before the records are updated.” – Dean Webb, Engineering Technician
