Ginsters, the household-name manufacturer of savoury pastries, has selected Mainsaver from Spidex Software to manage engineering maintenance at its plant at Callington, Cornwall. The first phase of the implementation will also include an interface between Mainsaver and Ginsters The project to evaluate and select a new Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) was led by Engineering Manager Steve Arthur. “We had an old software package that was hard work to use and which wasn’t giving us any of the information we needed.” he recalls. “We needed increased visibility of our cost of maintenance - in particular, spare parts requisitions - and this information also had to be available to Finance within our ERP system.”

“The link between the replacement CMMS package and System21 was therefore a key project requirement and we found that it narrowed the field enormously. Many of the vendors we spoke to hadn’t previously delivered a project of this kind, and it was just too important to entrust to first-timers.”

“We selected Spidex because they were able to offer a beginning-to-end delivery – a well-equipped and easy-to-use CMMS product in Mainsaver, a suite of web-based reports, a proven interface with System21 and an experienced implementation team with an excellent track record in the food industry.”

The implementation of Mainsaver at Callington is expected to deliver a number of important benefits. The first will be to provide additional support to the engineering team with its regulatory obligations. Steve Arthur explains; “Like all food manufacturers, we have to be able to demonstrate due diligence in our maintenance regime and regular audits are carried out.”

“When an auditor comes into the bakery, they expect be able to point at any plant item and find out from you when it was last maintained. With Mainsaver, that information is going to be at my fingertips.”

The second benefit will be to enable Steve and his team to target their maintenance activities where they will be most effective. “Ginsters is a high-volume, continuous manufacturing operation that runs 24 hours a day, every day,” he explains. “There are a minimal number of opportunities to carry out preventative maintenance, so it is vital to be using that time to carry out the right activities on the right equipment.

We’ll be making good use of performance indicators like Mean Time Between Failure and fault/cause analysis within Mainsaver to ensure that we make optimum use of the time available.”


“Maximising plant uptime is everything in operations like ours, and we anticipate that Mainsaver will fully support us in this area.”

Ginsters’ engineering team will be using Mainsaver to schedule work on some of the most sophisticated manufacturing plant in the UK.

One such example is the Schubert Pick-and-Place robot (pictured left) a formidable machine that picks up pastries at high speed from the end of the conveyor and, irrespective of orientation, deposits them right-side-up and right-way-around into multipacks.

With such state-of-the-art hardware in its bakery, it seems strange that there is a lingering perception in some sections of the public that Ginsters pasties are still made the way they might have been 100 years ago.

“It’s surprising how many people still think that our products are assembled and crimped by hand,” reveals Steve Arthur. “It’s easy to forget that we manufacture three million individual products every week here – to produce all those by hand? We’d need a much bigger bakery for a start!”

About Spidex
Spidex Software Ltd is the appointed UK & Ireland distributor for Mainsaver
EAM/CMMS software. We deliver, implement and maintain a superb suite of
modules that fully support engineering teams who are striving for best-inclass
performance.

Andy Neilson (Marketing & Communications Manager)
0121 779 0897 or 07951 546041
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Spidex Software Ltd
TS2 Pinewood Business Park
Coleshill Road
Birmingham
B37 7HG
www.spidex.co.uk