Founded 150 years ago, Crisp Malt produce an impressive range of malted and non-malted products, including several unique and exclusive barley malts primarily to the brewing industry. Operating principally from their oldest site in Great Ryburgh the business is now made up of 5 maltings across East Anglia and Scotland. Employing more than 170 people supported by a 25 strong engineering team, the sites produce 243,000 metric tons per annum.
Acquisitions and large investment in existing plant over the past decade have led the business to an understanding that they need to update systems to help them maintain and manage their assets to optimise production efficiency.
This created the need for a new role in the business which brought Andrew Rush in as Group Maintenance Engineer to review the current practices and suggest a continuous improvement roadmap. Andrew comments ‘the first thing I want to focus on is taking the overall business to a common platform so that we can drive continuity and consistency across the engineering departments, we reviewed our incumbent systems, but all agreed that Spidex Software offered a solution best suited to our needs’.
Crisp Malt’s Operations Director, Jake Lambert, continues ‘along with offering a simple to use system, Spidex’s focus on health and safety underpins our ongoing improvement strategy in this area. Their pre-work Dynamic Risk Assessment and post work Return to Service Checklist keeps the focus of our team on making sure all work is performed safely and all jobs left safe for operations to take over’.
The plan is to phase the project, initially focussing on a clear preventative maintenance strategy, the removal of paperwork wherever possible and the electronic recording of unplanned stoppages directly by the operations teams. Configuration of the day-to-day user dashboards and the automation of performance KPIs, via Spidex BI, will immediately remove an unnecessary amount of administration and reworking of data from the various existing systems and processes.
There are clear benefits to be had ‘We have a mixed aged asset base, with some equipment going back to the 1960s, we need to measure the reliability and true costs to enable us to invest in the right places as part of our 10-year plan’ says Andrew ‘As we progress, we will pull in full stores and purchasing management through Mainsaver to increase the granularity of detail required to push forward further’.
Spidex will be working with the Crisp Malt Engineering Team to deliver a pilot system at the Great Ryburgh site to define and implement the new standards and then roll out the working model to the other maltings at Mistley, Ditchingham, Portgordon and Alloa.
‘It is fantastic news having Crisp Malt choose Spidex as their partner to drive their maintenance strategy forward’ says Jonathan Starling, Spidex MD, ‘they are in good company with our other maltsters and brewers already using Mainsaver, we very much look forward to working with Crisp over the forthcoming months and years.’