WHAT HAPPENS WHEN AI JOINS THE BERKVENS DOORSYSTEMS MAINTENANCE TEAM
BY STEFAN VAN BUSSEL, TEAMLEAD TECHNICAL SERVICES, AND JEROEN WIJNEN, MAINTENANCE & INSTALLATIONS LEADER, BERKVENS DOORSYSTEMS.
complete multi-step analysis, no new platform required. The morning review transformed almost immediately, with the system assembling and summarizing what once took up to an hour. Its output matches our own manual analysis more than 95 percent of the time- recovering 125 – 250 hours per team lead annually, worth roughly € 12,500 –€ 25,000 per person.
It wasn’ t instant magic, though. The system is only as good as what feeds it- messy or inconsistent logging early on meant messier insights out. Poor data hygiene doesn’ t get fixed by AI; it gets amplified. Years of disciplined EAM usage were the real prerequisite, not the software itself.
Every morning at Berkvens Doorsystems, before a single machine starts up, a maintenance team lead is already at work- reviewing overnight breakdowns, shift logs, and notifications to build a picture of the machine park. That process used to take 30 minutes to an hour, every day, per team lead.
The stakes behind that hour are bigger than they look. Ultimo’ s Maintenance Trend Report found 63 percent of manufacturing organizations are struggling with an aging workforce- a challenge that’ s as much about vanishing knowledge as vanishing headcount. When experienced technicians retire, they take with them an understanding of how specific equipment behaves that exists nowhere in any system. That’ s the problem we set out to solve.
Once the data was clean, the payoff went beyond time saved: the system revealed that certain equipment issues were recurring structurally, not randomly- reshaping how we plan maintenance altogether.
Next up is AI-assisted troubleshooting, suggesting fixes based on past failures. The goal is that any technician, regardless of experience, gets the instinct of a decadeslong veteran on tap.
Which means that same team lead’ s morning now starts not with an hour of digging through logs, but with the answer already on screen.
Berkvens Doorsystems is a family-run manufacturer in Someren, Netherlands, part of Xidoor, producing interior doors, frames, and sliding door systems across Western Europe. We’ d already invested in an EAM platform to structure maintenance planning, but as data volumes grew, manually reviewing it all became the real bottleneck.
Our answer is digital workers- AI systems embedded in our existing enterprise asset management( EAM) workflow that independently monitor data and www. berkvens. nl
6 MACHINERY, AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING