Magna Digitizes Maintenance Management and Saves 30 Hours a Week With MaintainX

Customer background

Magna International Inc. is a global leader in automotive manufacturing, supplying critical components like frames and cradles to some of the world’s biggest carmakers, including Ford, General Motors, and Jeep. 

With a workforce of 1,400, Magna’s Cosma facility, based in Bowling Green, Kentucky, runs like clockwork. The plant operates 24 hours a day, supported by a large number of welding robots. “We have around 1,000 welding robots, not including the material-handling robots,” says Chris Keene, Maintenance Planner at the Magna International, Bowling Green facility. These operations yield a large volume of components, with a daily output of between 300 to 900 frames and cradles for each production line.

Maintaining this level of output requires a rigorous maintenance process, with the team running scheduled PMs weekly. In the past, this meant manually managing a large amount of work orders. “We managed between 300 and 500 work orders every week,” Chris recalls. However, the limitations of a manual system led them to seek a more modern, efficient solution that could keep pace with the scale of their operations.

Challenges

A cumbersome, manual system

As a Maintenance Planner, Chris oversees preventive maintenance for machinery and manages everything from work orders to setting up parts to ensuring completion rates.

Before MaintainX, everything was managed manually. Those 300-500 work orders the team was managing? They had to be handled via paper.

“We would print [work orders] out overnight,” says Chris, adding that the team would have to organize and distribute them manually after printing. “Every Thursday morning, we would sort those work orders, staple them, then divide them out to go to the different areas in the plant.”

Chris estimated that, in some cases, it could take up to four and a half hours just to get work orders in the hands of those who needed them.

Properly tracking work order completion

Once the work orders were created, printed, and distributed, Chris and his team needed to track their progress and maintain proper records. This required another manual process—collecting the work orders and manually logging the data into spreadsheets for tracking. After work orders would come back, Chris says, “We entered those into trackers on Excel sheets, then we'd go in and close them out every week, and once those were closed out, we filed everything in boxes.” 

Audit challenges and an inadequate solution

Those boxes would also become part of their challenges later. As a manufacturer, the team is subject to regulatory oversight, and auditors can show up with anything from a week’s notice to no notice at all. In such cases, Chris faced immense pressure to find and present the necessary documentation. He would spend hours looking through “dozens of boxes” and thousands of paper PMs just to find the single document the auditors required.

Apart from the stress and time-consuming nature of the approach, they also risked losing critical information. To get around this, the team implemented a modified system and began scanning copies of work order documents. “We started actually scanning every one of them into the computer,” Chris says. But even this was an insufficient solution as Chris and his team would have to manually scan hundreds of sheets of paper every week, which would cost them much-needed time and resources.

To address these issues, Magna brought in MaintainX to streamline their maintenance management, improve their audit response speed and quality, and save valuable production time.

The solution: Choosing MaintainX

With the growing demands of their operations and the limitations of their manual maintenance system, Magna set out to find a tool that could better serve their needs. The team evaluated several providers, seeking a solution that was flexible and powerful enough to handle their scale. After careful consideration and hands-on evaluation, MaintainX emerged as the clear choice due to its strong features and ease of use.

Hands-on testing

One of the key factors in Magna’s decision was the opportunity to test the product firsthand. MaintainX provided a demo that allowed the Magna team to dive into the system and see how it would work in their environment. This hands-on approach gave them confidence that the platform could meet their unique requirements.

"We could create work orders, see how everything was set up, and even review the history," says Chris. The demo allowed Chris and his team to explore everything from adding parts to work orders to tracking completion and historical data. This ability to test the product thoroughly helped Magna see that MaintainX was not just a theoretical solution—it was a practical tool they could start using right away.

A collaborative feedback loop

Another major reason for choosing MaintainX was its collaborative approach to customer feedback. From the start, the Magna team noticed that MaintainX was committed to continuously improving its product, often making adjustments based on real-time customer input.

“MaintainX is constantly adding features and doing things to make work easier for us,” Chris explains. "If something wasn't quite working the way we needed, they were quick to collaborate with us and implement changes."

This responsiveness significantly impacted Magna’s decision, as they felt confident that MaintainX would evolve alongside their needs.

Results: A smooth transition and 1,560 hours saved per year

The shift to MaintainX has led to significant improvements across Magna’s maintenance operations. The team successfully migrated over 20,000 annual repetitive work orders into the new system, thanks to the support of MaintainX’s implementation team. Now, almost every aspect of Magna’s maintenance operations has been digitized.

Since implementing MaintainX, the Magna team has seen a significant reduction in time spent on administrative tasks, particularly for maintenance planning.

“I’d say we’re saving at least 25 to 30 hours a week,” says Chris.

This newfound efficiency has allowed the team to focus more on critical maintenance activities rather than time-consuming paperwork and manual processes.

Higher quality, trustworthy data

Before using MaintainX, even small issues like ensuring pens were available to fill out work orders created inefficiencies. The bigger concern, however, was the quality of the data the team received. Paper work orders were prone to being lost or damaged, and work environments made it difficult to keep paperwork clean and legible.

“With the paper system, you always had to worry about things like losing pens or papers getting stained,” says Chris. “A lot of times, the PMs would come back so covered in grease or hydraulic fluid that you couldn’t even read what had been written. You don’t have to worry about that anymore with MaintainX.” Moving to a digital platform has eliminated these concerns, ensuring that data is not only collected but is accurate and accessible when needed.

Efficient parts management at everyone’s fingertips

Another major benefit Magna has experienced since implementing MaintainX is digitizing its parts inventory. With their stock listed in the system, they can quickly search for part numbers and descriptions directly from the shop floor. “All of our parts, including descriptions and part numbers, are listed in MaintainX,” explains Chris Keene.

The team has also assigned parts locations, ensuring staff can easily find what they need, when they need it. This digitized approach has improved efficiency by making it easier for technicians to access necessary information without leaving their stations.

Faster audits with no hassles

MaintainX has also made regulatory and compliance audits much faster and more efficient. Before, audits required the team to dig through boxes of files, often scrambling to locate the right paperwork for inspectors. Now, with MaintainX’s robust, cloud-based history and data management processes, everything is just a few clicks away.

"Nobody can lose a box of files anymore," Chris notes. "When the auditor came in yesterday—the Fire Marshal—he asked to see the last time we did a specific PM. I found it in a couple of clicks, and within four minutes, he had everything he needed. Before MaintainX, I’d spend the day before trying to dig through boxes to find what I thought he might ask for."

Comprehensive reporting and real-time insights

With a facility as large and complex as Magna's Cosma plant, effective reporting is essential for keeping track of the different groups and programs operating within the plant. MaintainX’s reporting features have empowered the team to organize and analyze data in a way that was impossible with their previous systems. Now, the team can access their data and apply relevant filters, allowing leaders to see exactly where every line stands in real time.

Being able to set up custom dashboards has also streamlined their workflow. In the past, they handled reporting manually and had to comb through spreadsheets, calculate completion percentages, and send reports across the plant. Now, with MaintainX, these dashboards automatically compile the necessary data and send out reports at set times every week.

“Before, we’d have to go through all the numbers and Excel sheets to figure out completion percentages and send them out across the plant,” Chris recalls. “Now, we’ve got a custom dashboard that sends everything out for us.”

Magna and MaintainX: A path to even greater efficiency

Despite the significant improvements Magna has already achieved with MaintainX, Chris sees even greater potential for the company’s future. He anticipates a system where the team can automate their monitoring of everything on the Cosma facility production line, from air pressure to fluid levels and vibration. In his view, such a system will help Magna move towards a maintenance approach that requires minimal manual inspections.

To achieve this, Chris is excited to dive more into MaintainX’s functionalities to automate their monitoring processes. With MaintainX’s flexibility and robust capabilities, Chris and his team can customize what they monitor, setting parameters that trigger alerts when issues arise. “We won’t need someone to go and check all the time,” he says. What does Chris’s ideal vision look like in summary? “I see us eventually getting to a place where everything ties back to MaintainX,” he says.

Chris and his team at Magna are tapping into the power of MaintainX to streamline processes, elevate data quality, and drive innovation across their maintenance operations all while unlocking game-changing opportunities at every turn.

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