39th FVI Expert Breakfast

Topic: "Retrofit or New Construction: When Standstill is Not an Option".

In this session, Thomas Hefele showed how his team at Paul Hartmann AG handles gigantic infrastructure projects during ongoing four-shift operations (24/6).

• The Space and Cost Problem: A central filter for 11 production facilities had to be renewed after decades. A standstill would have lasted four and a half weeks. The necessary pre-production of 48,000 pallets would have massively exceeded the plant's capacities and budget.
• The Redundancy Solution: Instead of stopping production, the team invested in a temporary redundancy filter. This was set up in the building, ran during the four and a half week renovation phase, and was then dismantled. In the end, this was more cost-effective than a weeks-long production outage.
• Greenfield Planning in Brownfield: When renewing the central palletizing, the team built a completely new facility on a newly installed stage directly above the ongoing goods receipt. The trick: The facility was conceptually planned first as a "Greenfield" (on the greenfield without restrictions) and then fitted into the tight "Brownfield" reality of the existing hall with minimal compromises. * The Rollback Strategy (Risk Minimization): To avoid blindly running into disaster, the new palletizing facility was gradually ramped up. Initially, only two of 14 palletizers were installed. The fallback scenario: If the new facility fails, the team could switch back to the old system within just three hours.
• The Dynamic 10-Year Plan: The success of such projects is based on foresight. Thomas Hefele and his team use a dynamic 10-year plan for maintenance and obsolescence. This is reviewed every three months within the team and serves to secure budgets with the board years in advance.

Classification: Strategic Foresight through "Operational Intelligence" and ADAM

This practical report is a perfect scenario for the ADAM-First strategy from our updated playbook. It shows that large projects only succeed if you master the data chaos.

• Brownfield-Native: Thomas Hefele's team had to integrate state-of-the-art facilities into old, established structures. ADAM is built precisely for this 'Brownfield' environment. Instead of assuming your IT landscape is perfect, ADAM brings the intelligence to work immediately with your existing, unstructured data in a value-adding way. We don't force you into months-long preliminary projects.
• The 10-Year Plan at the Push of a Button: Hartmann AG plans obsolescence topics 10 years in advance. What succeeds at Hartmann through excellent manual planning, ADAM automates. By autonomously crawling manufacturer data (Self-Building Knowledge), ADAM warns you early about expiring life cycles of components. This allows you to apply for retrofit budgets with the board in good time, instead of being surprised by a sudden failure.
• Risk Minimization through the Digital Life File: During the parallel operation of old and new facilities (Rollback Strategy), documentation chaos quickly arises. ADAM maintains a seamless 'Digital Life File'. Every modification, every redundancy switch, and every newly used component is documented in a revision-proof manner. When the trade association (BG) is on site, you have immediate transparency about the safety status of the facility.

Conclusion: Anyone who wants to rebuild the heart of their factory during ongoing operations needs absolute transparency about the facility status. ADAM provides this Operational Intelligence – autonomously, integratively, and without the compulsion for prior, tedious data cleansing.