Like 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 142-year-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. 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 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 Berwick-Upon-Tweed in remote northern 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 ROI
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, says Richards, 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.”
In order to introduce such efficiencies, the company had to make cultural adjustments that would encourage the maintenance staff to use the software. Namely, it stopped paying its maintenance workers on an hourly basis and switched 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. “The shop floor packet is very friendly,” Richards says.
Friendly enough for even an operations director to use as he dedicates his busy days to making sure that the kilns are running, barley’s coming in, malt’s going out, and the lights stay on?
“I just ask the daft questions, and Pat uses Mainsaver to get the answers,” Rowley quips. Sounds like a winning blend.