Manufacturing Executive - November 2008 - (Page 22) C ASE STUDY England’s Simpsons Malt had to impose cultural changes to reap full rewards. BY MARK HALPER 22 November 2008 Photos courtesy: Simpsons Malt l ike the beer and whisky makers it sells to, Britain’s Simpsons Malt knows that a good blend of ingredients can be the key to excellent results. So it was a mix of requirements across the company, coming from the boardroom to the malting kilns, that drove the 142year-old, family-owned barley processor to one of its most significant recent IT deployments. Simpsons’ installation last year of CMMS (computerized maintenance management software) from Birmingham, England-based Spidex Software Ltd. has yielded results that the heads of operations, maintenance, and finance would all toast. On the surface, the deployment of Spidex’s Mainsaver programme looked like a straightforward attempt to sharpen the maintenance procedures that keep Simpsons’ equipment turning barley and other grains into more than 200,000 tonnes of malt a year, expanding to over 300,000 next year. Indeed, maintenance played a big role. “This has helped us take maintenance improvements to the next level,” says Operations Director Steven Rowley. Maintenance is critical — an outage can cost 300 tonnes of malt in a day, enough to scupper a shipment to customers, which include Scottish single malt whisky maker Macallan and beer maker Scottish & Newcastle. But the idea to install Mainsaver might not ever have sprouted if it hadn’t caught the eye of Simpsons Chief Financial Officer Graeme Hogg, who saw a great potential for tying Mainsaver into the company’s JD Edwards ERP system from Oracle. That move, in turn, would reduce paperwork, generate electronic invoices and purchase orders, and help track maintenance equipment as part of the company’s assets. “It needed top-level support and buy-in,” recalls Chief Engineer Pat Richards. That wasn’t hard to
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