When a large meat processing plant transitioned from council ownership to private ownership in 1996, the new owners found themselves with a significant problem. The outgoing council had left no real systems or structures behind for this complicated operation employing around 1,000 people, and plant uptime was sitting at an abysmal 72%.
The situation was serious enough that the land value now exceeded the business value, and with overcapacity in the industry at the time, competitors were circling like vultures. The workplace culture reflected the operational chaos, and the whole place was in desperate need of an overhaul.
Building Systems from the Ground Up
The new owners of this particular meat plant recognised they needed to create systems and processes across the board, and that included taking a closer look at their maintenance management systems and processes. They installed BWM MainTrak (the 1996 early desktop version of our CMMS) and used it to capture their asset knowledge and project management tasks as they worked through the transformation.
The approach they followed is what we now train as standard practice, which is a structured path from technical competence to technical confidence.
- First, they mapped all their assets into the system, identifying what maintenance tasks were actually needed, and establishing baseline data about their equipment and maintenance history.
- Next, they adopted a philosophy of “what did we learn from that?” to embody an ethos of continuous learning, turning today’s failure into tomorrow’s maintenance plan.
- Then, they used operational science on the captured data to make informed decisions about PM tasks.
- We challenged unnecessary routines, and helped them build maintenance schedules based on facts rather than guesswork or old (and often outdated) habits.
While this journey took time (industry experience shows it’s usually a minimum two years from fighting fires to maintenance excellence), they committed to that timeframe and followed through on the work required.
The focus was on moving from reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance, challenging outdated FAT routines (those originating from Fear And Tradition), optimise PM task frequencies, and building a system that captured and leveraged their technical intelligence.
The Results: 99.6% Uptime with 67% Fewer Staff
Within two years, the plant had gone from 72% uptime to 99.6% – and even better: they held that level of reliability for the next 15 years.
But the benefits went well beyond uptime figures; the increased maintenance efficiency allowed them to go from a maintenance staff of 40 to just 13, achieving better reliability with fewer people. In the meantime, their maintenance costs dropped from $1.22 per stock unit to 56 cents. Think about that for a moment: better reliability, 67% fewer maintenance staff, and maintenance costs cut by more than half.
For a meat plant that competitors saw as a likely closure candidate, this transformation instead positioned them as an industry leader with reliability and cost performance that became the benchmark for others in the sector.
The Bigger Picture
This case goes beyond just the meat industry and demonstrates something we’ve learned over decades working with maintenance teams, which is that you can’t just put a CMMS on someone’s desk and expect transformation. No CMMS software can work miracles if the team’s not ready; but in the right hands, it can be a tool for company-wide change.
The journey from reactive maintenance to maintenance excellence requires commitment to building technical competence and confidence, challenging traditional approaches with operational science, and creating a culture that values continuous improvement. While that takes time, the results speak for themselves.
Interested to see how MainTrak could work for your company? Visit our homepage or get in touch with our dedicated team of maintenance specialists. We’ll help you assess the current situation and make an informed decision about your maintenance management software.