The Company

This leading agricultural cooperative specializes in producing high-quality beet sugar. The farmer-owned major beet sugar extraction cooperative has over 500 shareholders who annually plant and harvest sugarbeets on approximately 125,000 acres producing nearly 1 billion pounds (about 453592000 kg) annually in the Midwestern United States.

With an impressive annual revenue of $418M and a remarkable 2844% ROI on annual MC subscriptions, the cooperative has increased its profit by $250K. The company is committed to providing superior products and services and is a testament to excellence and innovation.

 

The Challenge

The company was losing nearly $250K in productivity due to frequent downtime on their beet washer. The cause of the downtime was unknown since there was no record of work completed and no standardized process for work order requests. Instead, the scheduling relied solely on the "best judgment" of the scheduler. This lack of comprehensive data prevented them from getting to the bottom of the issue and maximizing uptime and operational efficiency.

 

The Solution

The cooperative deployed Accruent’s Maintenance Connection, utilizing crucial functionalities in the CMMS’ work order management system, such as:

Work Order Tracking: Easily create, view, update, and execute work orders more effectively. Accessing critical service details (area, duration, order status, task type, parts required) to identify the source of downtime.

Reporting and Analytics: Understand key metrics and share findings to optimize scheduling and purchasing.

Centralized Dashboard: View maintenance requests, manage daily maintenance schedules, update metrics, add notes, and stay on top of the field team’s maintenance activities.

Data revealed the root cause of the beet washer downtime, i.e., bearings were too old and past their useful life of 10 years. To resolve this, the cooperative funded a $500K bearing replacement project, replacing 16 bearings with a 10-year useful life.

 

The Results

The data and work order automation capabilities found in Maintenance Connection ended up saving time and money for the sugar extraction cooperative.

  • Generated a two-year payback period due to increased uptime of the beet washer
  • Expected to yield an annual $250K profit for the next eight years
  • Enabled justification of additional equipment purchases based on data aggregation in Accruent Maintenance Connection
  • Provided work order analysis to support investment in other projects with high ROI potential