Seafood supplier shells out on maintenance

Uddingston, UK – Dawnfresh Seafoods has selected Mainsaver CMMS to manage engineering maintenance activities at its main production site in Uddingston, Lanarkshire.

The system was supplied by Birmingham-based Spidex Software, the UK and Ireland distributor for Mainsaver EAM/CMMS software.

Dawnfresh is the largest trout producer and the second-largest supplier of frozen scampi in the UK, with a customer roster that includes most of the UK’s household-name retail multiples. It operates three manufacturing sites with a supply chain that includes 22 fish farms.

The company’s 16-man maintenance department already had a legacy CMMS in place, but were getting little useful information from it. The choice was to upgrade the existing system or replace it with a new one.

The old system had never been properly implemented and was several versions out of date, according to Brian Stewart, maintenance manager at Dawnfresh.

“It was difficult for our users to operate and as a result the system had largely fallen into disuse,” he explained. “To reinstate it would have meant starting again from scratch, so we looked elsewhere in the market.”

Mainsaver looked a suitable option when it was introduced by Spidex Software, Stewart continued. “It’s straightforward to use, with all the reporting functions we were looking for. It can be expanded as required and operated across multiple sites, which is ideal for us.”

During the selection process, Dawnfresh’s evaluation team visited a nearby food manufacturing site that also uses Mainsaver, in order to see the software operating in a similar fast-moving production environment.

“The reference visit was an important exercise,” said Stewart. “The Spidex customer that hosted us supplies food products to most of the same grocery multiples as Dawnfresh does and therefore experiences similar challenges. We certainly saw what value Mainsaver can deliver within a high-pressure multi-site manufacturing operation.”

Another marker was a recent successful audit of Mainsaver by a Dawnfresh customer – a major grocery retailer – at the same Spidex reference site.

Implementation of Mainsaver at Dawnfresh’s Uddingston plant has already commenced. It will include the SpidexBI web reports suite, as well as MobileMainsaver to enable remote working.