AssetOptics Helps Nunes Company, Inc. Meet Compliance Goals; Transform Maintenance Management and Reporting for Foxy Produce
In the highly regulated agricultural industry, compliance can mean the difference between a thriving enterprise and a challenged one. For Nunes Company, Inc.’s Foxy Produce brand, the inability to efficiently track and document maintenance activities and schedules was making compliance more difficult.
With the help of AssetOptics and its Facilities, Equipment and Fleet Maintenance for Salesforce platform, Foxy Produce implemented a custom maintenance workflow solution that meets its compliance goals and much more. Today, says Foxy Produce Director of Engineering and Maintenance Scott Goad, “We are happy campers. AssetOptics has been very helpful for us.”
From Elementary to Essential
Foxy Produce operates a variety of mission-critical equipment at each location, all of which are subject to period mechanical integrity reviews by inspectors from the federal and state Occupational Safety and Health Administrations, the federal Department of Transportation, and the federal and state Environmental Protection Agencies. Prior to implementing the AssetOptics-based workflow system, maintenance work for the brand’s three distribution centers was initiated—and its completion recorded—through email messages. There was no global recordkeeping or management of the entire process and its history.
Goad and Peter Townsend, the Foxy Produce Information Systems and Technology Director, knew the process had to be improved, but they saw the project as an opportunity for broader process improvement. They began searching for candidates that could ensure not only efficient, accurate maintenance visibility and recordkeeping but also workflow efficiency—particularly better workflow scheduling for Foxy Produce’s distributed crew.
“I wanted a Software as a Service solution, hosted wherever possible. I was not interested in increasing the IT footprint in our operation,” says Townsend. “I also didn’t want a tool that wouldn’t scale down to our processes or was so complex it would get in the way. Some of these tools could ramp up to run a large city.”
The search had uncovered AssetOptics, and Townsend says he saw a match, right away. “When I looked at it, I thought, ‘This looks right-sized.’ It could scale much larger than our needs, but it definitely matched our level of complexity and workflow, right out of the box. I was also pleased with what it could do and with how well AssetOptics integrated with Salesforce.”
Customization Drives Value
Even though Goad and Townsend agreed AssetOptics was a good solution for their needs, overall, the built-in purchase order (PO) system didn’t work for them as implemented. AssetOptics rose to the challenge, with Principal Mike Edwards offering to perform the necessary customizations. “There were a few instances where we needed additional fields on some pages,” says Goad. “Mike and his team were really flexible in meeting our needs, and it is a great tool for us now.”
Today, Foxy uses AssetOptics to track and document equipment maintenance, schedule future work, and order parts and supplies related to maintenance. They can generate recurring tasks and document them via an electronic “checklist.” As a highly mobile platform, AssetOptics also enables the Foxy Produce workforce at multiple locations to retrieve job information and complete their “paperwork” digitally, on a mobile device.
Big Benefits Now; Plans for the Future
“With AssetOptics, we now can track the time it takes to accomplish a task and see how many man hours, total, we are investing in large projects,” says Townsend. “Utilizing the PO system, we can better manage our parts and materials purchases for projects and maintenance work. The project management functionality helps us remember when it is time to perform preventive maintenance activities, which all occur at different intervals.” A bonus outcome, Townsend says, has been to reduce IT impact and expense. “It is completely hosted, so initially we avoided a big impact of hundreds of hours on the IT team if I had needed to provision a server and get it set up,” says Goad. “Moving forward, had we chosen an on-premise solution, I would have needed to add at least a half a staff member to my team. It’s an important financial benefit to avoid that expense.”
Looking towards the future, Townsend says, Foxy Produce is planning to implement a food safety management system and integrate it with AssetOptics. “We are keen to leverage the APIs that Asset Optics offers for analytics and food safety.”
About Foxy Produce
Nunes Company, Inc., is a pioneer in progressive farming with generations of hands-on commitment to grow and deliver produce of exceptional quality. Company founders Bob and Tom Nunes developed the Foxy brand to send quality, organic and conventional produce throughout the United States and around the world. Today, Nunes family members farm and represent farmer-partners to provide an array of products grown on fields totaling more than 18,000 crop acres in California, Arizona and Nevada. For more information, visit www.foxy.com.
