Cloud-based maintenance management platforms help packaging and processing companies stay organized with workflows and manage daily operations. Limble is one such platform that focuses on helping in-house maintenance teams. Kristin Drake, VP of Customer Success at Limble, informed company representatives of five ways to secure additional resources for their operations at one of PACK EXPO Southeast 2025's Innovation Stage sessions on March 10.
1. Align needs with business goals
Drake says maintenance teams should strive to align their needs with business goals and can do so in two main ways. First, focus on leadership priorities such as savings, efficiency, and compliance, and second, translate maintenance needs into business impact.
Dillon Cummings, Maintenance Planner at Riverbend Meats, spoke on his company’s experience implementing this strategy.
“What we’ve done is went through and identified the key equipment to our operations and compared our ‘need to haves’ versus our ‘nice to haves,” Cummings said. “We walked through the plant and looked at what our process was going to be like, how we were set up. [We] just identified the equipment that needs to run in order for us to produce.”
2. Use data to drive decisions
Next, Drake states that leveraging computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) data to show return on investment (ROI) and identifying key metrics that influence leadership, such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and downtime costs, are ways to use data to drive decisions.
Cummings described how his maintenance team at Riverbend gathers and uses data.
“Using Limble, we’re able to build our dashboards. We have different [dashboards] for different teams, [such as] harvest maintenance. And we compare the work orders versus the work orders completed or how many preventative maintenance [PMS] tasks are getting done on a daily or weekly basis. We also have different equipment that falls under harvesting, and we can see how many parts [the team is] using, the time spent on those, [and] assets, along with the repair and maintenance costs on those as well.”
3. Build a financially compelling case
Maintenance teams can use ROI calculations and payback periods to justify funding and show cost-benefit reactive versus proactive maintenance to build financially compelling cases for leadership. Drake says teams can approach cases by thinking about how their companies can make additional profit decisions or reduce costs.
Cummings shared an example of incentivizing employees to log data that can ultimately be used to make those financial cases.
“We use dashboards to keep track of what our technicians are doing every day. We have a challenge set up so that if they log so many hours within a week or a certain amount of weeks, then we provide them a meal,” Cummings said.
4. Communicate in leadership’s language
Communicating in company leadership’s language is an important strategy for maintenance teams to secure more resources. Drake outlines two ways of accomplishing this: frame requests in terms of risk mitigation and revenue impact and tell stories with data and visuals for maximum impact.
Cummings spoke on how his maintenance team has frequent communication with leadership to keep them aware of projects and potential improvements.
“We have meetings every day with maintenance managers. And in those meetings, we’ll talk about the projects that we need to get done or ideas we have to improve the process. We also have a ‘feedback loop,’ where we talk about how we’re doing with our personnel and how we’re doing with our CMMS,” Cummings shared.
5. Leverage a CMMS to strengthen your case
Lastly, Drake points out the importance of maintenance teams leveraging a CMMS to strengthen their cases to leadership. Two ways of achieving this are (1) to show efficiency gains and cost savings with CMMS automation, and (2) to prove value with predictive maintenance insights and asset tracking.
“When I first started [with Riverbend Meats], there were about four maintenance members, and the rest were leadership people,” Cummings illustrated. “Maintenance got together to see what we needed, and a CMMS was one of the biggest things we were looking for. [Maintenance] met with leadership, the general management, and made a case that you need to get a CMMS to stay ahead of maintenance. That was a really big point, and another one was [the CMMS helping to have] everything in the same place. So, we can have all of our reports, parts, [and] costs in the same place and stay organized.”
