ADL Standardizes Multi-Site Maintenance and Inventory with eMaint 

Amalgamated Dairies Limited (ADL), a leading dairy processor based in Prince Edward Island, Canada, operates six facilities and manages over 400 assets to produce a wide range of dairy products, including butter, milk, and cheese.  

ADL had an existing CMMS, but it fell short of meeting ever-increasing maintenance management needs. ADL implemented eMaint for a CMMS with more flexibility and the ability to streamline multi-site maintenance management. Working closely with support, ADL tailored eMaint to its operations by adding images to assets and inventory, enabling direct labor assignments to ​​assets, and streamlining preventive maintenance processes.  

Over the past seven years, eMaint has helped ADL better track costs, centralize inventory across locations, and make data-driven purchases. Maintenance practices are now standardized across all six facilities, boosting efficiency and reducing waste. Looking ahead, ADL plans to leverage eMaint reporting features to track KPIs and estimate task durations, further optimizing maintenance operations. 

Amalgamated Dairies Limited (ADL) is a dairy processor in Prince Edward Island, Canada. They make dairy products like butter, evaporated milk, sweetened condensed milk, fluid milk products, cheddar cheese, and specialty cheese products. Its cheese production facility is one of the largest in Canada. 

While ADL had managed maintenance with a CMMS, it didn’t meet expectations. It needed a more robust and flexible solution to manage its 400 assets across six facilities. ADL turned to eMaint to find that solution. 

Unsurprisingly, some ADL employees hesitated to retire their existing CMMS and replace it with eMaint. But the user-friendly interface, combined with a broad asset management toolset and the ability to streamline preventive maintenance, led to quick and enthusiastic adoption of eMaint by ADL. 

ADL worked closely with eMaint to build out customizations to simplify and streamline maintenance tasks specific to company operations and procedures. “We added pictures with our assets and inventory,” explains Thomas Crowell, Maintenance Supervisor at ADL. “That saves our technicians a lot of time when looking for assets or spare parts.” 

Another critical feature ADL wanted was to assign labor hours to work orders and associated assets. eMaint customization capabilities enabled ADL to utilize this time-saving capability. “We can do direct labor charged to the assets, and it saves a ton of time,” says Crowell. “You still get the same tracking, but you don’t have to worry about work orders being left open.” 

For the past seven years, ADL has utilized the unique customization capabilities of eMaint  

to achieve cost savings and improve maintenance across all its facilities.  

With eMaint, ADL has:   

• Improved preventive maintenance practices: Using eMaint to schedule and assign PMs involves the entire team when creating and assigning work orders to the appropriate technicians.  

• Recognized labor cost savings: ADL has realized cost savings throughout all departments by allocating and assigning labor to the assets undergoing repair. “Our maintenance department is almost like a contractor for the company, the way we bill out individual’s labor,” explains Crowell.  

• Centralized inventory: With eMaint inventory management, all ADL sites share a single inventory location, simplifying spare parts storage and eliminating unnecessary waste on stored parts.  

• Enabled data-driven inventory decision making: With eMaint purchasing integration, teams have a clear picture of purchasing costs and can make data-driven decisions about delivery times and costs with different suppliers. “Having different suppliers on the inventory side gives you a way to track purchasing costs,” Crowell says.  

• Achieved global standardization: Assets, inventory, and maintenance tasks are now standardized across all six facilities, streamlining maintenance for technicians. “Standardization simplifies everything,” says Crowell. 

 Crowell looks forward to the future as his team continues working with eMaint. “The future with eMaint is really bright,” he says. “Things are consistently evolving, and everything is going in the right direction.” In the future, he plans to use eMaint reporting features to dig deeper into critical KPIs, like work order completion rate, and to use eMaint tracking to provide his team with estimated completion times for maintenance tasks.