It’s going well for the Luxembourg company Ferro-Tech, which specialises in railway works. It has just been awarded at the first edition of the Grand Prix ProdPilot.
This Grand-Prix rewards innovative concepts in process optimisation and productivity increase for companies based in the Greater Region.
The ceremony took place at the end of November in Zweibrücken in the presence of several partners from the ProdPilot project consortium. It crowned the Luxembourg company as the winner among five other candidates from France, Germany and Belgium.
Digital Tablets
“As part of the Fit 4 Innovation program, with the support of Luxinnovation and the Ministry of the Economy, we worked with the consultant Résultance to achieve productivity gains of around 10%,” explains Jean-Luc Doucet, Ferro-Tech’s founder and CEO. “Insofar as the suppliers with whom we work are imposed on us by our customers such as CFL, SNCF Réseau or SNCB, we have concentrated our efforts on the maintenance aspect. It is the one on which we can more easily activate productivity gain levers.”
With a fleet of machines, none of which cost less than 2 million euros, the most expensive even reaching 7 million, downtime and maintenance costs very quickly become substantial. “We have therefore worked on the implementation of a tool to better identify technical failures in order to improve the efficiency and speed of interventions”.
Now equipped with an individual digital tablet, the twenty or so machine managers and machine operators can directly document any intervention with photos or videos. So they can transmit the relevant information to third parties. “That way, everyone knows exactly what we’re talking about,” says Mr. Doucet.
Luxinnovation, methodological partner
This “Grand Prix de la productivité” confirms Ferro-Tech’s choice of strategy and the company is now turning towards the next step: a 360° digitalisation of all staff (80 people) to facilitate daily work, whether technical or administrative.
The Luxembourg coordination of this Grand Prix was managed by the University of Luxembourg. “We have acted as a methodological partner in this Interreg Prodpilot project, which is part of our dynamic to support digitalisation within companies and particularly SMEs,” adds Caroline Muller, manager of the Luxembourg Materials & Manufacturing Cluster. “We are all the more proud to see that Ferro-Tech has received this well-deserved award.