Comparesoft Podcast

Maintenance in Food and Beverage Manufacturing at Arla Foods

Josh Clarke, Senior Maintenance and Engineering Manager at Arla Foods, joins the Comparesoft CMMS Podcast to share what good maintenance really looks like in food and beverage manufacturing. Josh runs maintenance at Arla's Aylesbury site, one of the world's biggest dairy factories, where his team handles 500 to 700 work orders a week across processing, production, and a purpose-built energy centre that generates the plant's own electricity, steam, and refrigeration. He has spent his career building maintenance programmes across dairy, bakery, and meat processing, including a 90% downtime reduction during his time as Engineering Manager at Délifrance. In this episode, Josh talks about: * What a day looks like running maintenance at a 24/7, 365 dairy site * How his team prioritises and moves 500 to 700 work orders a week * How food and beverage sites maintain uptime without a shutdown window * How he tripled preventative maintenance output by doing one job a day * Why plants revert to spreadsheets even when they have a CMMS in place * How he cut downtime by 90% at Délifrance, starting from a stabilise-first mindset * The three things that separate well-run food and beverage sites from the rest 🔗 Listen and read more: Comparesoft: 👉 https://comparesoft.com/cmms-software/manufacturing/food-beverage/

How to Ensure a Successful ERP Implementation Go-Live

Laura Pointer, Founder of Pivotal Project Management, joins the Comparesoft ERP Podcast to explain how she has built a 100% go-live success rate across ERP implementations in oil and gas, engineering, manufacturing and facilities management. In this episode, Laura unpacks what ERP go-live actually means, why most buyers mistake it for the end of the project, and the methodology that has kept her record intact. She walks through the checklist non-negotiables, the most common causes of delay, and what it takes to sustain a go-live once the consultants have demobilised. Laura talks about: * What ERP go-live really means, and how to define a successful one beyond "the system is on" * The honesty-first methodology behind her 100% success rate, including why RAG greenwashing kills programmes faster than any technical issue * The go-live checklist non-negotiables, from people-first sequencing to multi-date sign-off on customisations * What go-live day actually looks like, including the field-rename incident that almost broke a fully integrated solution * Why change management is the single biggest cause of go-live failure, and how to spot the quiet resistors * How big bang and phased rollouts compare, and where peer cascade pays off * What it takes to sustain a go-live in the first six months, including hypercare, top-down messaging, and letting it settle 🔗 Listen and read more: https://comparesoft.com/erp-software/implementation/go-live/

How to Build a Condition Monitoring Strategy That Gets Results

Andy Mellor, Founder of Pragmatic Maintenance & Reliability, joins the Comparesoft Maintenance Podcast to break down what a successful condition monitoring strategy actually looks like, and why so many programmes fail to deliver, even when the right tools and data are in place. Drawing on over 20 years of hands-on experience across heavy industry, including eight years at British Steel and contract work at sites such as Anglesey Aluminium, Andy explains why culture, communication, and trust matter more than technology when it comes to turning predictive data into maintenance action. In this episode, Andy talks about: * The real reasons condition monitoring programmes fail to deliver ROI * What a successful condition monitoring strategy looks like and how to measure it * How to present vibration, thermography, and oil analysis findings to plant managers * Why proving business consequences matters more than proving faults * Simple, low-cost wins most maintenance teams overlook * What to look for in condition monitoring hardware and software * How to balance AI and remote sensors with the judgement of trained technicians * The four principles that prevent machinery from needing emergency troubleshooting 🔗 Listen and read more: https://comparesoft.com/cmms-software/condition-based-maintenance/monitoring-strategy/

What Your ERP Delivery Partner Does Between Purchase and Go-Live

Yuriy Zaletskyy, CTO and Co-Founder of Acupower, joins the Comparesoft ERP Podcast to pull back the curtain on ERP delivery: What actually happens once a business has signed the contract and the ERP delivery partner gets involved? Drawing on over thirteen years of implementation experience, including hands-on development and architecture work across cloud ERP platforms, Yuriy explains: * What happens in the first two weeks after a buyer signs with an ERP delivery partner * The gap between polished ERP sales demos and day-one implementation reality * Why the 70% ERP failure statistic deserves more scrutiny than it gets * Why customisation is treated as the "root of all evil" in ERP, and when it is actually the right choice * How his team built a custom integration from scratch to solve an international payroll gap * The questions buyers should be asking their ERP delivery partner before they sign 🔗 Listen and read more: https://comparesoft.com/erp-software/implementation/delivery-partner/

Retail Facilities Management at Scale: Lessons from 700+ High-Street Stores

Christopher Lloyd, Facilities Manager at EssilorLuxottica UK, joins the Comparesoft Facilities Management Podcast to discuss the reality of maintaining over 700 high-street retail stores across fashion and optical healthcare brands. Drawing on over 12 years in retail and wholesale facilities management, Chris explains how FM teams protect the customer experience at scale, why communication and transparency matter more than perfection, and what he has learned from rolling out a new self-managed CAFM system across his entire estate. In this episode, Chris talks about: * How FM teams prioritise thousands of incoming work requests across 700+ stores * Why health and safety, operational disruption, and customer experience form the priority structure for triaging reactive maintenance * How fashion brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley raise the bar for store presentation and preventive maintenance * The differences between managing optical healthcare environments and traditional fashion retail * What a self-managed CAFM system delivers compared to a vendor-led platform, including price intelligence and contractor assignment * The importance of first-time fix rates and why reducing revisits matters more than headline SLAs * Practical advice for anyone stepping into a multi-site retail FM role for the first time 🔗 Listen and read more: https://comparesoft.com/facilities-management-software/facilities-manager/retail/