For almost one year now Mainland Dairy has been operating the Workmate Maintenance and Engineering Management system at its UHT single serve processing and packaging facility in Christchurch New Zealand.

Mainland is a name that will be familiar to almost every house hold in New Zealand. Mainland’s quality products, award winning advertising and reputation for involvement in the New Zealand way of life are all indications of a company that understands it customers and is innovative in its thinking in the competitive dairy industry.

In the on-going effort to provide quality products at an affordable cost, Mainland installed the New Zealand developed Workmate Maintenance and Engineering Management system. Workmate was installed to provide a single easy-to-access location for all maintenance information for the UHT and Milk Plants to ensure that a reliable and consistent product could be produced in an environment where there are many critical factors. The critical pasteurising temperature of milk and hygienic seal of the containers required are two examples of the precision standards that must be maintained at all times.

Peter Caird, Maintenance Supervisor for the UHT processing plant explains…

"Workmate has been an incredibly valuable tool to help us achieve our standards and provide accurate historical records of all maintenance that has been performed on our equipment. Workmate has enabled us to respond with ease to all kinds of maintenance information requests and we are even able to search back to a particular day if required to see what work was done at that time. Before we installed Workmate there was a tendency to go on a witch hunt when something went wrong. It was easier to point the finger at someone else than really get to the bottom of the problem and find a solution regardless of who or what was at fault.

Our ability to solve problems quickly by using facts and figures has improved staff moral and our working procedures. We now operate as a team that is working together to provide an environment of on-going improvement and it really is amazing to see such a dramatic change that has been made possible from implementing such a simple tool.

Our production staff are involved with the system and it really is a tool that all of our staff can make use of for a consistent quality product and much improved communication between different production and maintenance roles. I really can say quite definitely that the benefits have been numerous."