Case Study: Leading Agricultural Cooperative Company maximizes equipment uptime and justifies asset purchases with Maintenance Connection

How Accruent’s Maintenance Connection helped this leading agricultural cooperative save time and money by utilizing crucial functionalities in the CMMS’ work order management system

A leading farmer-owned beet sugar cooperative that produces nearly 1 billion pounds of sugar annually from about 125,000 acres faced unexplained, recurring downtime on a critical beet washer that cost roughly $250K in productivity. The root cause couldn’t be identified because there was no standardized work order system or historical maintenance data—scheduling relied on a planner’s judgment rather than measurable metrics.

The cooperative implemented Accruent’s Maintenance Connection CMMS—using work order tracking, reporting/analytics, and a centralized dashboard—to capture service details and analyze downtime. Data revealed bearings had exceeded their 10-year useful life, prompting a $500K project to replace 16 bearings. The fix produced a two-year payback, is expected to deliver about $250K in annual profit for the next eight years, and enabled data-driven justification for additional equipment investments.