Tara Manufacturing reduced its downtime by 75%, saving the company $100,000 in the first year after implementing Limble’s services.

Tara Manufacturing manufactures vinyl swimming pool liners and pool covers. Nearly four decades after its founding in 1984, the company began to experience tremendous growth. When founder Marshall Richardson retired, and his daughter, Tara, took over for him, it became clear that Tara needed to make changes to continue growing.

Tara hired Carlos Melendez as the company’s maintenance supervisor in 2020, who then began researching machine maintenance providers to handle many tasks at two different Tara facilities, including maintenance, equipment upkeep and e-maintenance. Tara loses $1,000 per hour if its machines malfunction, a big problem considering its equipment would sometimes be down for up to three weeks.

After meeting with many companies for four months, Melendez cut his list down to a top ten, a top five and then a top three. He says that he picked Limble CMMS, a provider of computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), because of the organization’s customer service team, which answered every question he had during Zoom meetings and responded to his calls regardless of when they came in.

Limble’s maintenance management system now allows Melendez to receive instantaneous updates from both venues on the status and functionality of parts, equipment, assets, what machines are breaking down and how long the machines will be offline. These notifications make it easier for other people to handle Tara’s manufacturing operations if Melendez is ever busy with another task.

In order to drastically decrease Tara’s downtime, Limble began focusing its energy on the most expensive pieces of Tara equipment that had the most expensive downtime costs. From there, Limble set up a CMMS system that allows employees to quickly report any equipment problems. Limble CEO Bryan Christiansen says the real-time reporting allows the company to fix any equipment issue in minutes rather than hours or days because Tara is made aware of the issue much sooner via the CMMS notifications.

“We set it up so that people can easily report problems,” Christiansen says. “Let’s make sure that there’s really fast reporting so that issues can be fixed quickly. If something breaks, and it takes four hours to report, then you just lost $4,000. In one day of work, you can solve that issue.”

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After solving the downtime issue, Limble also implemented preventative measures, like oiling machinery, changing belts more frequently and replacing filters more often, to ensure Tara experienced fewer equipment malfunctions.

Tara was soon able to decrease its downtime rate by 75% and, in the month after employing Limble, saved $10,000 on downtime costs. In the first year after implementing Limble’s services, Tara had saved over $100,000.

 “Limble was the best bet for our company, and it has saved us so much money and time. For what we’re paying for it, there’s no comparison,” Melendez says.

Resource Links:

Limble CMMS - https://limblecmms.com/

Tara Manufacturing - https://taramfg.com/