A new service developed by our sealing business, the Service Container, has been delivered to our customer Metsä Fibre’s plant in Äänekoski. The Service Container expands the existing KLINGER Const™ consignment warehouse service model by bringing the products needed for the plant’s annual maintenance, such as gaskets and accessories, even closer to the equipment being serviced. Designed in collaboration with the customer and implemented as a trainee project, the Service Container demonstrates KLINGER Finland’s commitment to customer-oriented solutions and providing motivating trainee projects.
Service Container for More Efficient and Smoother Annual Maintenance
The idea for the Service Container was conceived in spring 2023 when KLINGER Finland and Metsä Fibre were looking for ways to improve plant maintenance. The solution was a mobile Service Container modeled after the KLINGER Const™ consignment warehouse service, which was delivered directly to the maintenance site at Metsä Fibre’s plant in Äänekoski in April 2024. The Service Container will be available for Metsä Fibre for approximately three weeks during the plant’s annual maintenance.
According to KLINGER Finland’s Regional Sales Manager for Central Finland, Jani Häkkinen, Metsä Fibre anticipates that this maintenance period will be one of the best in years thanks to our service. The contents of the Service Container, including gaskets, flange protectors, and welding blankets, were planned in collaboration with the customer and are readily available directly from the plant yard without ordering and delivery delays. This not only speeds up the maintenance process but also minimizes production interruptions and improves efficiency.
The efficiency of the annual maintenance and the Service Container is further supported by our expert on-site, who ensures that the right products are available and suitable for their intended purpose. Our expert also has a camera to capture images of non-standard gaskets, enabling quick delivery of custom-cut gaskets from KLINGER Finland’s gasket workshop.
KLINGER Finland is Committed to Developing Innovative, Customer-Focused Solutions
The Service Container is a testament to this commitment. In the future, we see opportunities to expand the Service Container concept further, offering it more widely for annual maintenance in various industries, such as power plants and paper mills, and to new worksites that do not yet have their own storage facilities. In the future, the Service Container could also include an on-site gasket cutting service, allowing gaskets to be cut to the customer’s specifications directly on-site. This service would bring cost savings and efficiency to our customers’ operations by ensuring immediate product availability without unnecessary capital investment and delivery delays.
Motivating Trainee Project for the Service Container’s Space Planning
The space planning for the Service Container was managed by Ilmari Huvinen, a student of technical design at Omnia Leppävaara, who is completing an internship at KLINGER Finland as part of his studies. Ilmari’s task was to determine the space needed for the stored products and design the interior of the Service Container to be functional, ensuring that the required products are easy to find and retrieve from the container.
The space planning was a motivating and suitably challenging project for Ilmari, as large and fragile gasket materials needed to be stored in sufficient quantities while ensuring they remained intact during transport. Ilmari created the necessary drawings, based on which the shelving and pull-out drawers were custom-made and arranged in the container according to his plan.
The correct attachment of the elements was ensured in collaboration with KLINGER Finland’s experts, and overall, the cooperation within the project team was smooth. During the project, Ilmari gained new skills, including creating and comparing requests for quotations, information retrieval, and solution-oriented thinking in changing situations typical of design projects.
KLINGER Finland values offering motivating internships and projects to new future professionals. In addition to providing students with valuable work experience, the fresh perspectives of trainees are very much welcomed by a company with long-standing industry experience. The Service Container space planning project was an excellent example of a well-executed trainee project that brings genuine added value to KLINGER Finland’s customers.
