Published : 23/07/2026
Customer Success Stories
Inetum and Dukem Solutions reduce downtime at Van Geloven
A maintenance chatbot is your experienced colleague for 24/7 advice. When a production line for frikandels, bitterballs, or other snacks stops at Van Geloven, every minute counts. Inetum developed a maintenance chatbot that allows technicians to identify the cause of a machine breakdown much faster thanks to generative AI. Using the chatbot, they query the wealth of information that Van Geloven has built up in the maintenance software Rimses (CMMS/EAM) from Dukem Solutions.
Building a Centralized Maintenance Knowledge Base
Van Geloven is the Dutch company behind well-known snack brands such as Mora, Kwekkeboom, and Van Dobben. The company has approximately 1,500 employees, spread across locations in Tilburg, Maastricht, and Helmond. Since 2016, it has been part of the Canadian company McCain. "It is our philosophy to improve every single day," says Marcel van Gogh, Head of Technical Services at Van Geloven. "That is why we wanted to centralize and unlock all technical documentation, including manuals, work orders, maintenance reports, and more."
Until around 2019, that information was scattered throughout the company, mainly in the heads of the most experienced technicians. "They are obviously the true heroes of the department, but it also put us in a very dependent position." While these employees have enormous knowledge and experience, they are not available day and night. They take vacations and will eventually retire. "Moreover, the technical department was constantly in firefighting mode. We were running from one intervention to the next, which made it difficult to schedule preventive maintenance."
Van Geloven reduces downtime with an AI Maintenance Chatbot
Digital transformation as a foundation
To anchor the accumulated knowledge in the company and make it available to colleagues, the technical department brought all documentation together. This was initially done physically and on paper in filing cabinets in the technical department office in Tilburg. This gave Van Geloven a solid base to take the step toward digitization.
As a digital platform, Van Geloven adopted Rimses, the software for asset management and maintenance management from Dukem Solutions. The switch to Rimses and the consistent logging of all maintenance tasks and historical data formed the crucial basis for further digital transformation. "We scanned all paper documents and digitized all maintenance processes so that this knowledge is available to all colleagues around the clock. If there is a problem at night, you no longer have to wake anyone up."
Asking the chatbot questions
The next step was to make the available information in Rimses even faster to query. Van Geloven reached out to Inetum for this. Inetum performed data cleaning, indexed all documents in Rimses, and built a chatbot that allows technical staff to query that information directly. It is a closed system on Van Geloven's Azure tenant. Inetum developed the chatbot with Azure Functions and OpenAI GPT 4.0 and integrated it seamlessly with Rimses.
The chatbot acts as an assistant available to the technician 24/7 via the Rimses mobile app on their smartphone. "It is also an assistant that does not judge you," says Marcel van Gogh. What a technician might not dare to ask a colleague out of hesitation, they can check with the chatbot. This can be done in both Dutch and English, which simplifies the involvement of non-native speaking colleagues.
Speed and peace on the work floor
If there is an unplanned stoppage, the technical department must identify the cause as quickly as possible. In the past, staff had to manually look up the necessary information in the system under great time pressure. Today, the combination of the Rimses platform and the Inetum chatbot drastically shortens the path to the right information. The technician does not have to search themselves but lets the chatbot know what they need, directly on the work floor.
This integral project, consisting of the digitization of maintenance processes in Rimses, the central accumulation of knowledge, and the AI solution from Inetum to make this data directly queryable, has led to impressive results. In 2019, the average unplanned downtime at Van Geloven was 7.5 percent. Today, that figure has been reduced to 2.2 percent.
At the same time, the new approach has brought a sense of peace to the technical department. "Thanks to the more efficient workflow, we can now plan over twenty times more preventive maintenance than before," explains Marcel van Gogh. "In this way, the system strengthens itself, because more preventive maintenance means less chance of unplanned downtime."
Van Geloven AI Maintenance Chatbot
The project illustrates how IT and maintenance strengthen each other in a smooth collaboration with Inetum and Dukem Solutions. The technical department is no longer in constant firefighting mode. "That makes for more satisfied employees. They have stopped searching and started finding."
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