Dawnfresh nets the benefits of new maintenance software

Dawnfresh – the largest trout producer and the second largest supplier of frozen scampi in the UK, with a customer list that includes most of the UK's household-name retailers – has three manufacturing sites and 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 by way of useful information from it. The choice was to upgrade the existing system or replace it with a new one. Brian Stewart, maintenance manager at Dawnfresh, explains: "We knew the pitfalls we wished to avoid. The old system had never been properly implemented and was several versions out of date. It was difficult for our users to operate and, as a result, the system had largely fallen into disuse. To reinstate it would have meant starting again from scratch, so we looked elsewhere in the market." It opted for the Mainsaver system from Spidex Software after sending an evaluation team to visit a nearby food manufacturing site that was using the system. "The reference visit was an important exercise," says Stewart. "The Spidex customer that hosted us supplies food products to most of the same grocery multiples as us, and therefore experiences similar challenges. We certainly saw what value Mainsaver can deliver within a high-pressure multi-site manufacturing operation. "Just as importantly, we found that one of our customers, a very large grocery retailer, had recently audited the same Spidex reference site and passed Mainsaver with flying colours. That was a significant factor."