Many of the steel plates and slit strips used in Denmark will have passed through our manufacturing facilities. For this reason, the company has no time for prolonged stops or for planned and unplanned production stops. As a result, we use the closing days to thoroughly repair and maintain the machinery.
Over the year, we continuously do maintenance work on our cutting and splitting lines. Production Manager Martin Helle explains that, “Keeping the lines up and running is our top priority. Every five weeks, we remove a production line for overhaul, and it doesn’t take more than one shift before it is back in full operation again. If a breakdown occurs in the intervening periods, we carry out an emergency repair right away. These repairs are usually completed during one shift as well.”
Martin Helle proudly adds: “In my 28 years in the company, we have only had three or four breakdowns lasting more than 24 hours. This testifies to the fact that we take good care of our machines.” He continues, “We spend the summer giving slitting and cutting lines major overhauls. The summer holidays give us a necessary break on the production lines, so we can replace components instead of just repairing them".
In addition to the summer holidays, the company also allocates the Christmas and New Year’s holiday for thorough maintenance work.
Taxi ride from Munich
We take pride in our machines. Our employees our highly dedicated when breakdowns or other mechanical challenges arise. Experts – both in-house and external – are consulted right away, even if it means a night-time phone call to a supplier far away in southern Europe or on the other side of the globe.
A taxi ride from Munich to Langeskov with one spare part as the only “passenger” a few years ago is an example of the lengths we go to when we need to get a machine up and running again. Martin Helle adds: “It may not have been the cheapest solution, but it was the fastest.”
Dry ice as cleaning agent
As a final remark, Martin Helle explains how the company uses dry ice to clean its electrical cabinets.“Every few years, we clean the electrical cabinets on the machinery lines with dry ice. This is because one property of dry ice is that it expands by up to six or seven hundred times when it touches things that are not cooled. This causes all dirt and contaminants to simply fall off. In fact, it is so thorough and effective that one of our external electricians thought we had purchased new electrical cabinets,” he concludes with a smile.