The Botswana Meat Commission (BMC) invested in a MAXIMO software and implementation contract with the Pretoria based business and IT solutions provider MST to improve work and asset maintenance management at its meat processing and packaging plants in Lobatse and Francistown.
BMC was established by Botswana`s government in 1966 to co-ordinate the production of beef from the national cattle herd of some 2 to 3 million which grazed on chemically free ranches covering a substantial part of the country`s 580 000 square kilometres.
At its inception BMC had only one abattoir in Lobatse. Today it has grown into a multinational company with its head office still in Lobatse. The facility at Lobatse is a complete and integrated complex consisting of an abattoir with a throughput capacity of 800 cattle and 500 small stock per day and a canning, tanning and by-products plant. BMC has a branch abattoir in Francistown in the northeast of Botswana with a capacity of 400 cattle and 150 small stock per day as well as a transport fleet and other properties in Botswana.
BMC is Botswana`s sole exporter of lean meat, which features prominently in markets throughout the world and has achieved an excellent reputation for quality. BMC owns marketing subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Germany, Holland and Greece; an insurance company in the Cayman Islands; and cold storage facilities in the United Kingdom and South Africa.
Mr Mokenti Raborokgwe, BMC`s outgoing Engineering Manager, says in the past planning at BMC was done on an ad hoc basis. BMC had neither a planning officer nor a computerised maintenance management system. At the beginning of 1998 BMC embarked on extensive restructuring of the engineering department.
"BMC keenly experienced the need for a maintenance planning section that would enable us to improve planned maintenance scheduling, engineering inventory control and maintenance processes in general while, at the same time, have an impact on the bottom line in terms of maintenance cost reduction. It is extremely important for BMC, as is common in process industry, to maximise plant availability and therefore throughput. Because many of our processes are in series the financial loss of operational downtime is significant, making planned and preventative maintenance that much more important," Mr Raborokgwe said.
BMC launched a full investigation to put a work and asset maintenance management system in place. BMC evaluated the features, functionalities and benefits offered by several systems: "We required a user-friendly, flexible system that would give us visibility on BMC`s maintenance and related activities. Our investigation concluded that the MAXIMO Work and Asset Maintenance Management System met our requirements the best," he said.
MAXIMO will be integrated with Oracle Financials in a best-of-breed configuration, to maximise the potential organisational benefit. As a result of the international preferred Co-operative Applications Initiative partnership between MAXIMO and Oracle Financials, there is a standard API (Application Program Interface) for seamless integration of these two systems. The API ensures single point of data entry and is guaranteed by both parties for future development and upgrades.
Danie van Vuuren, Senior Account Manager: MAXIMO at MST, says in the process-manufacturing environment the organisational bottom-line can really only be influenced by the plant operational efficiency, therefore maximised operational availability and optimal operational performance are constant objectives. "Superior asset maintenance management extracts hidden profits by positioning maintenance as a strategic core function, preventing work stoppages and enabling maintenance work to become knowledge based. The logical choice for BMC was to select a functionally superior best-of-breed work and asset maintenance management solution such as MAXIMO."
BMC`s acquisition of MAXIMO re-affirms the presence of MAXIMO in the process industry and in Africa and is yet again proof of the stability of the Oracle/MAXIMO relationship.
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