Hungrana: Achieving world-class maintenance, work safety and environmental protection
Delivering Maintenance 4.0 with SAP
Following a shift in economic incentives, Hungrana’s management realized that the best way to differentiate its business was to outperform competitors through a relentless focus on operational excellence and product quality. The first step was to ensure efficient, safe operations by digitally transforming the company’s maintenance and environmental health and safety processes.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer Products | Szabadegyháza, Hungary | 350 employees | Kontron Hungary & BCS |
Functional locations within Hungrana’s Szabadegyháza plant
Maintenance tasks per year with 150 technicians working daily
Annual savings predicted through more efficient maintenance
Managing Director, Hungrana Kft.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer Products | Szabadegyháza, Hungary | 350 employees | Kontron Hungary & BCS |
Functional locations within Hungrana’s Szabadegyháza plant
Maintenance tasks per year with 150 technicians working daily
Annual savings predicted through more efficient maintenance
Managing Director, Hungrana Kft.
Enabling excellence at scale
Hungrana has grown to become Europe’s largest producer of starch and isoglucose, as well as a leading manufacturer of alcohol and feed by-products. The company’s plant complex in Szabadegyháza, Hungary processes 3,500 tons of corn per day and is a key link in the supply chain for food and beverage manufacturers across the continent.
In previous years, Hungrana’s sugar business had benefited from a quota system. When these quotas were phased out, the company’s leadership realized that it needed to shift its strategy and find new ways to differentiate its business to stay ahead of the competition.
Management knew that the company’s biggest costs—raw materials and energy—were subject to market forces and beyond their control. However, other major items on the balance sheet included maintenance and environmental health and safety, and these offered the potential for optimization.
Managing Director, Hungrana Kft.
Maintenance and safety challenges
The plant at Szabadegyháza comprises more than 30,000 functional locations with more than 20,000 individual pieces of equipment. Its maintenance team includes 50 full-time employees and at least 100 external contractors on a daily basis, who tackle more than 25,000 maintenance tasks annually. The total spend on maintenance was more than 2 billion HUF (5.2 million EUR) per year, and regularly exceeded the planned maintenance budget.
As the company grew and invested in sustainability, the maintenance burden became even greater—for example, when Hungrana introduced efficient biomass-fueled boilers to help reduce CO2 emissions, it added additional complexity to maintenance processes. In addition, paper-based processes for both maintenance and safety management were time-consuming for technicians and supervisors and made it difficult for the company to capture institutional knowledge about asset management.
Dr. Farkas comments: “In the past, people worked for a stable, prosperous firm like Hungrana for decades, but that’s now a thing of the past. As people come and go, we need to retain their knowledge about how our assets are maintained, and the best way to do that is to capture it into a system. Otherwise, the essential administrative aspect of maintenance and safety management would become a big drain on our human resources.”
Managing Director, Hungrana Kft.
Transforming maintenance
The initiative to digitalize maintenance and safety management at Hungrana came from the top of the organization and had full support from management from day one. The company set up a new Strategic Development Department and a Business Process Organization (BPO), with delegates from every department involved in the project. This made change management easier and helped to spread a supportive mindset throughout the organization.
“Management was clear that the project was not just a matter for the business, and it wasn’t just an IT software project either,” says Kirilla-Császár Szabina, Head of the Strategic Development Department. “We had to create synergy between these two aspects.”
Hungrana already used SAP® ERP software, so it made sense to look at SAP solutions for maintenance too. “SAP has such a broad portfolio, and they had a solution for all our needs – from UHF RFID tags to identify equipment, to document management systems for our piping and instrumentation diagrams,” says Bence Cs. Nagy, Project Leader. “And when we saw a demo of the SAP Service and Asset Manager mobile app, it seemed to fulfill all our wishes.”
As part of the project to implement SAP Service and Asset Manager, an industry cloud solution, Hungrana also decided to upgrade its existing SAP Plant Maintenance module with a more modern SAP Enterprise Asset Management solution. But the biggest challenge wasn’t related to the technology – it was redesigning Hungrana’s maintenance processes, establishing the right master data for all of the company’s functional locations and assets, and implementing the changes in a factory that operates 24/7.
“Adjusting the SAP solutions to our company was the easy part,” recalls Dr. Farkas. “We had to put our own operations in order and define our entire master data structure. That’s a huge effort for such a big factory, involving a lot of people. When we put it into operation, it was spectacular to watch.”
The BPO team decided to start with a pilot project in the company’s BIO2 bioethanol plant – a modern facility that is relatively isolated from Hungrana’s other units. The team set up 2,800 functional locations in the SAP Enterprise Asset Management solution, and installed UHF RFID tags on all the key items of equipment. By scanning these tags with their mobile devices, maintenance technicians can instantly access relevant work orders, piping and instrumentation diagrams and other documents, and send reports in real time from the factory floor to the central maintenance system—with zero paperwork.
The implementation of SAP Service and Asset Manager was led by Hungrana’s partner Kontron Hungary. “The Kontron team made the app very user-friendly,” says Kirilla-Császár Szabina. “That’s important, because our maintenance colleagues often work in poor visibility conditions, so large buttons and a straightforward interface are important. Kontron really tailored the solution for us, and the outcome is a device that’s very well-suited to our needs.”
Managing Director, Hungrana Kft.
Focusing on workplace safety
In parallel with the maintenance project, Hungrana also decided to introduce environment, health and safety (EHS) solutions, including the SAP Environment, Health and Safety Management applications for incident management and environment management and the SAP Work Clearance Management application. This was a first-of-its-kind project in Hungary, supported by the company’s local partner BCS.
SAP Work Clearance Management helps to protect technicians working on factory equipment by ensuring that work permits are issued and approved and lockout/tagout procedures are performed and checked, before issuing authorization to perform the required maintenance tasks. The lockout/tagout process ensures that employees are protected from machines and equipment that could cause injury due to unexpected start-up, energization or release of stored energy during maintenance or service.
Meanwhile, the environment management functionality helps Hungrana track all processes that could affect the environment, collect data from experts in the field, and check that all tasks related to legal compliance are being completed on time. Data and reports from the application make it easier for Hungrana to acquire and maintain environmental certifications and achieve its sustainability goals.
Finally, Hungrana is using the incident management functionality to track technology-related incidents, accidents and near-misses. Employees can report them via this system and raise alerts. The EHS team can then investigate the incident, add relevant documentation such as maintenance reports and even financial records about the loss generated, and take corrective or preventative actions to reduce the risk of similar incidents in the future.
The successful delivery of the SAP solutions at Hungrana was rewarded with the SAP Quality Award for Central and Eastern Europe – a major accomplishment that the company’s management team is proud to celebrate.
According to Dr. Farkas’ estimates, Hungrana’s investment in smarter maintenance is likely to save the company more than EUR 400,000 per year. “It is already a huge saving. We now have the insight we need to deploy our available funds more effectively and make better use of our human resources too.”
For example, if Hungrana temporarily has spare capacity in its maintenance team, the technicians supplied by its maintenance partners could be redeployed to help another company, which would be a win-win for all parties. “That’s why we’re putting a lot of effort into sharing the knowledge we have gained,” says Dr. Farkas. “We want to help other manufacturers in our region reach a level which allows further cooperation with them.”
Both the maintenance and EHS solutions have also been successful in reducing the amount of paperwork dramatically in Hungrana’s processes. “We now only keep things on paper if it’s required by law,” says Márton Czene. “The integration between our SAP systems for maintenance and EHS means we always have access to the data we need, without relying on paper forms and files.”
In the bigger picture, Hungrana’s commitment to environmental sustainability could also deliver a financial edge—not only by helping to avoid fines, but also by making it easier to obtain environmental certifications that facilitate access to lower-interest loans and finance for future capital expenditures.
“In the future, banks will provide loans to companies who comply with their sustainability criteria,” concludes Dr. Farkas. “It is our clear ambition to be ahead of the competition in this area, and with the SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution on our roadmap, we plan to maintain our lead.”
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Featured partners
Kontron Hungary’s SAP business line has specialized expertise covering many modules and new SAP products, as well as project experience with large, medium-sized and small enterprises, both in the Hungarian and international markets. The company’s strength is supporting its customers’ entire SAP project and operational lifecycle, with particular emphasis on implementing SAP S/4HANA and SAP C/4HANA, system operation and support, training, quality assurance, audit and licensing. Learn more at www.kontron.hu.
BCS is a privately owned Hungarian IT and business consulting company. Its portfolio includes implementing ERP systems, providing IT consulting services, and developing business intelligence solutions and custom software. Founded in 2003, BCS is one of the five largest SAP consulting companies in Hungary, and has achieved SAP Gold Partner status. Learn more at www.bcsconsult.hu.