Transforming Heating Equipment Manufacturing: How KOSPEL Shifted from Reactive "Firefighting" to Predictive Maintenance with QRmaint CMMS
By Paweł Bęś, Logistics and Maintenance Marketing Expert, QRmaint
Published: September 24, 2026
Main Facts
In the high-stakes world of heating system manufacturing, assembly precision, continuous process flow, and unyielding equipment reliability are the primary drivers of market leadership. For industry veterans, even brief moments of unplanned equipment downtime can translate into staggering financial losses, missed delivery windows, and strained customer relationships.
KOSPEL, a premier heating equipment manufacturer with over 35 years of engineering experience, supplies advanced thermal comfort solutions to residential and commercial markets across Europe and the globe. To protect its production continuity across multiple high-volume facilities, the company executed a sweeping digital transformation of its maintenance operations.
By deploying the cloud-based QRmaint Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), KOSPEL successfully shifted its operational strategy away from reactive, chaotic "firefighting" toward predictive, automated maintenance scheduling. The operational impact has been profound:
- Preventive maintenance surged to 60% of total maintenance activities, up from a baseline of just 20%.
- Reactive breakdown work plummeted by 60 percentage points, effectively neutralizing the primary source of shop-floor inefficiency.
- Real-time visibility and data-driven KPIs replaced fragmented paper logs, empowering executive leadership to make precise capital expenditure (CAPEX) decisions for future plant modernizations.
"Everything was clear. We needed a digital foundation that would allow our floor teams to act quickly and log data transparently, while providing management with real-time analytics to prevent future breakdowns before they even occur."
— Thomas Szafransky, Maintenance Director, KOSPEL
Chronology: From Fragmented Legacy Processes to Digital Maturity
To understand the scale of KOSPEL’s operational turnaround, it is necessary to examine the evolution of its maintenance workflow—tracing the path from traditional administrative bottlenecks to a streamlined, mobile-first cloud architecture.
Phase 1: The Legacy Era (Pre-Implementation)
Prior to adopting a centralized digital platform, Kospel’s multi-plant maintenance department struggled with a heavily fragmented information flow. The daily routine of technicians and engineers was hindered by manual record-keeping habits:
- Siloed Communication: Service requests, technical specifications, and maintenance notes were scattered across loose paper documents, whiteboards, and verbal handoffs. Without a centralized digital trail, maintenance supervisors found it nearly impossible to trace recurring equipment failures across complex welding and assembly lines.
- Analog Scheduling: Inspection schedules relied heavily on physical wall calendars, spreadsheets, and individual employee memory. This made maintaining strict machine operating tolerances difficult, regularly resulting in sudden mechanical or electrical failures.
- Lagging Analytics: Manually aggregating raw data to calculate critical reliability metrics—such as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR)—was a laborious, error-prone process. By the time reports reached executive management, they offered purely historical insights rather than actionable, real-time intelligence.
Phase 2: The Deployment of QRmaint CMMS
Recognizing that manual methods could no longer support the company’s growth trajectory, KOSPEL initiated a partnership with QRmaint. The primary objective was to eliminate communication barriers, digitize multi-plant workflows, and embed mobile capability directly into the hands of shop-floor technicians.
The implementation focused on rolling out three core technological pillars:
- Asset-Level QR Coding: Every critical machine and assembly station was labeled with a unique, durable QR code. Scanning a code with a standard mobile device instantly routes technicians to the asset’s complete service history, technical schematics, user manuals, and historical work orders.
- Automated Preventive Schedules: The platform shifted scheduling away from human memory, automatically generating work orders based on actual machine operating hours (runtime counters) or fixed calendar intervals. This enabled a seamless, friction-free transition to a proactive maintenance strategy.
- Live Operational Dashboards: Automated data streams continuously aggregate maintenance inputs into real-time performance charts and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Maintenance supervisors and plant managers now view live dashboards displaying real-time equipment health status across all facilities.
Supporting Data and Operational Metrics
The transition from intuition-based maintenance to a data-driven model delivered immediate, measurable improvements across KOSPEL’s manufacturing ecosystem.
| Maintenance Metric | Legacy Baseline (Pre-QRmaint) | Post-Implementation Performance |
|---|---|---|
| Preventive Maintenance Share | 20% | 60% (+40 percentage points) |
| Reactive Breakdown Share | High (Primary focus) | Reduced by 60 percentage points |
| Information Accessibility | Delayed / Paper-based | Instantaneous / Cloud-based |
| Data Aggregation Speed | Days / Weeks (Manual) | Real-time automated dashboards |
These metrics confirm that systematic, automated preventive maintenance directly improves asset availability. By increasing Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and sharply reducing Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), KOSPEL has unlocked unprecedented operational predictability.
Official Responses and Expert Insights
Reflecting on the cultural and technical transformation of the shop floor, Maintenance Director Thomas Szafransky emphasized the profound shift in how his teams approach daily operations:
"The increase in mean time between failures and the decrease in repair times directly prove that systematic, automated, preventive maintenance simply works. QRmaint gave us the tool to turn intuition into hard data. Today, preventive actions account for 60% compared to reactive ones—a massive leap from 20% before implementation. QRmaint provides us with far greater operational predictability."
The transition also marks a significant milestone in modern B2B manufacturing technology. Paweł Bęś, Logistics and Maintenance Marketing Expert at QRmaint, noted that the success of the collaboration lies in the software’s practical alignment with daily shop-floor realities:
"In modern manufacturing, success is anchored in process continuity. When companies replace paper logs and fragmented spreadsheets with intuitive mobile tools, they don’t just fix machines faster—they empower their workforce to build a permanent competitive advantage rooted in operational transparency."
Implications for the Heating Manufacturing Sector
KOSPEL’s successful digital pivot offers several crucial takeaways for industrial manufacturers navigating the complexities of modern production:
1. The Death of Reactive "Firefighting"
Manufacturing plants that rely on reactive maintenance are perpetually exposed to unplanned downtime, inflated labor costs, and expedited shipping fees for emergency spare parts. Kospel’s experience proves that even legacy manufacturing environments can break the cycle of reactive maintenance by introducing automated, condition- and time-based triggers.
2. Bridging the Gap Between Shop Floor and Executive Board
In many manufacturing organizations, maintenance data remains trapped at the machine level, making it difficult for executive boards to justify budget allocations. By centralizing asset failure data, maintenance departments can provide clear, quantitative justifications for capital expenditures (CAPEX), ensuring that investments in plant modernization and new machinery are targeted where they are needed most.
3. Cultivating a Data-Driven Work Culture
Technology alone cannot solve operational inefficiencies; it must be embraced by the workforce. By utilizing user-friendly mobile interfaces and QR-coded asset tags, KOSPEL reduced administrative friction for technicians. This ensured high user adoption rates, transforming data collection from an administrative chore into an intuitive part of the daily routine.
Conclusion
The collaboration between KOSPEL and QRmaint demonstrates that digital transformation in heavy manufacturing yields tangible, lasting results. By eradicating paper-based logs and implementing a robust, cloud-based CMMS platform, KOSPEL has secured uninterrupted production continuity for its flagship heating systems.
As Thomas Szafransky and his team continue to refine their maintenance strategies, KOSPEL stands firmly as an industry benchmark—proving that a seamless blend of mobile technology, automated scheduling, and executive foresight is the ultimate recipe for modern manufacturing excellence.
