How CMMS Pays For Itself Inside 6 Months
Huntapac Produce Ltd, one of the country’s largest and most successful growers, packers and distributors of high-quality root vegetables has reported full return on investment within 6 months of go-live with Mainsaver, the award-winning computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) from Spidex Software.
Following an onsite audit by one of its customers – a large supermarket multiple – which gave the company’s engineering department disappointing ratings for its preventative maintenance regime, Huntapac recruited a new maintenance manager and made the decision to implement a CMMS to help manage the maintenance schedules more effectively.
Mainsaver was the system Huntapac selected, on the basis of its ease of use and ready ability to be widely deployed around the site. Maintenance Manager Paul Bond explains: “Most of the competing solutions required us to delegate at least one person to spend all their time just administering them. That seemed to us to defeat the object – we wanted engineers, managers and production personnel all involved.”
Having created a database of the company’s plant assets, the implementation team attached new preventative maintenance schedules against each one and then made the entire system available to engineers and production staff alike by loading Mainsaver onto touchscreen PCs housed in stainless steel kiosks in the engineering workshop and out in the production area.
The effects were almost immediate. These included:
- A threefold uplift in the number of recorded maintenance activities
- Huge increase in the percentage of maintenance work completed
- Significant reduction in maintenance time-to-repair
- New programme of modifications and improvements to food processing machinery
The cumulative effect of these and other improvements has been a reduction to almost zero in the incidence of major breakdowns of the type that previously used to stop production altogether.
“A few years ago we were suffering two or three total production stoppages every week,” recalls CMMS Project Manager Will Hunter. “Speaking today, we haven’t experienced such an event for months. It’s a massive step forward.”
When a company is the business of supplying the nation’s supermarket giants, the spectre of unplanned production downtime looms large – particularly when a retailer is able to triple or even quadruple an order across 24 hours, as some of Huntapac’s customers do.
“We simply have to fulfil the supermarket’s order in the timeframe we are given” says Hunter. “If we lose two hours’ production during the day owing to a breakdown, we have to make that time up during the night at overtime rates – so the knock-on costs of non-productive time are enormous. Reducing breakdown rates so comprehensively has meant that Mainsaver paid for itself within six months of installation.”
Perhaps most pleasingly of all, the follow-up audit from the same supermarket had a far happier conclusion.
“We passed with flying colours” says Paul Bond. “There was a lot of praise for our PM program and Huntapac is now featured on that supermarket’s Best Practice website! By any standards, this represents fantastic progress and Mainsaver has been central to that.”
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