Manufacturing Executive - November 2008 - (Page 23) get, because, as Richard notes, “We were looking at integrating accounting with maintenance. That was always the objective.” So with CFO Hogg’s buy-in, the company spent £35,000 on a 12-seat license from Spidex, which it installed in a few weeks’ time in June at Simpsons’ main malting facility in Ber wick-UponTweed in remote nor ther n England. The Berwick plant is in the process of increasing its output by 40% and expects to be producing 250,000 tonnes of malt per year by next spring. THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT The investment has already paid off in several ways. Richards is quick to extol one of the benefits that squares with the CFO’s objectives. “All of our orders are now electronic,” Richards says, referring to maintenance department orders for spare machine parts, bearings, gaskets, and the like. Whereas in the past, maintenance workers would have to handwrite an order and give it to accounting for data entry, now, he says, “there’s no more paper. All our orders are electronic. There’s no more ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ and double typing.” Richards counts 1,120 purchase orders that maintenance fed directly into the JD Edwards ERP since Mainsaver went live. That’s 1,120 times that the company has eliminated typing and double-entry tasks. That, Richards says, has contributed heavily to a 20% reduction in maintenance costs, from £7.50 per tonne a few years ago to £6.00 per tonne today. A portion of those reductions pre-date Mainsaver’s installation, but the Spidex software has helped maintenance process improvements hit Rowley’s “next level.” It helped that Richards had, in effect, been preparing for the Mainsaver deployment for three years by building a database of maintenance events and information, using Microsoft Access and Microsoft Office tools. He started soon after he joined Simpsons in 2003. As at many companies, maintenance at Simpsons had not previously organized such a database. Switching to Mainsaver gave the 12-person maintenance crew access to information, whereas in the past, only a few of the staff could access the information because of prohibitive seat licenses, Richards says. The switch to Mainsaver entailed minor data corruption but mostly proceeded smoothly. Integrating into JD Edwards took an additional six months and £3,700, with the help of U.K. integrator Whitehouse Consultants. In addition to reducing paperwork, Mainsaver is improving maintenance efficiency. Because it tracks tasks, stocks, and suppliers, it helps the maintenance department avoid unnecessarily repeating a maintenance job. “You don’t want an engineer doing a job that another has just done,” Richards says. The same detailed records have helped Simpsons provide information to European environmental regulators, who monitor noise, dust, and effluents, because it tracks works on machinery that affect those emissions. Operations Director Rowley adds that Mainsaver has helped spot problems in the maintenance of everything from the compressors that feed malting kilns to light bulbs. “It has given us much more visibility into maintenance,” he says. “It lets me ask the questions I never knew to ask before, like ‘why do these lightbulbs keep blowing?’ ” It has also cut down on redundant purchases of spare parts and makes an automatic note of when the company has to order parts, which it then feeds to the JD Edwards software. Parts records are vital to a facility like Simpsons’ Berwick plant, which is situated in a rural area between Newcastle and Edinburgh, where it can be difficult to receive quick delivery of parts. “We carry something like £200,000 pounds of spare parts on site,” Richards says. “It’s important that we know where the spares are and where and when we use them.” Mainsaver provides In order to introduce such efficiencies, the visibility into the company had to make cultural adjustments that maintenance would encourage the maintenance staff to use required to keep the software. Namely, it stopped paying its main- Simpsons’ plants tenance workers on an hourly basis and switched running. them to salaries. As Richards says, “An hourly worker wouldn’t mind still being on-site at 8 in the evening and getting paid overtime. But if you’re salaried, and you’re still here at 8, you’re not happy. You have an incentive to get the job done.” And since Mainsaver is geared toward efficiency and “getting the job done,” workers use it, he says. Richards claims that Mainsaver has also encouraged the maintenance staff to “take ownership” of various jobs. “They can see what needs to be done, and that if they don’t do job 53, then they might be on call this weekend.” Further encouraging its uptake: Mainsaver is easy to use. ESOURCE CENTER “The shop floor packet is very ARTICLES: friendly,” Richards says. Industry Update: EAM Friendly enough for even an www.managingautomation.com/eamupdate operations director to use as he Maintenance No Longer on Schedule dedicates his busy days to making www.managingautomation.com/onschedule sure that the kilns are running, A New Schedule for Asset Monitoring barley’s coming in, malt’s going www.managingautomation.com/maintenance out, and the lights stay on? “I just ask the daft question, COMPANIES MENTIONED: and Pat uses Mainsaver to get the Spidex Software Ltd. answers,” Rowley quips. Sounds www.managingautomation.com/spidex like a winning blend. s R November 2008 23 http://www.managingautomation.com/eamupdate http://www.managingautomation.com/executive/onschedule http://www.managingautomation.com/maintenance http://www.managingautomation.com/executive/spidex
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