Mixing the Ingredients for a Fully Baked Asset Care Strategy

Ensuring the alignment of asset (equipment) care with the demands of manufacturing in the process industries is a challenge for every owner. Achieving uptime, safety and cost goals are vital for a reliable supply chain and competitive business. Asset care professionals that design predictive, preventative and protective strategies for assets will claim that these tasks are identical based on the failure modes for common equipment likes pumps, vessels, piping, etc. However the food processing industry has unique assets starting from food preparation to packaging.

Many of the assets like mixers, cookers, fillers, box makers, tapers, palletizers and wrappers have failure modes that have a short time frame from the early signs of failure to the complete loss of function. Asset care strategies must account for these failure modes and be able to detect and prevent this loss of function. These losses of function place stress on the facility productivity and operating costs.

The key is to employ both Maintenance and Production personnel in looking for the early signs of failure. This involves a redesign of preventative tasks to produce predictive tasks looking for the early signs of failure. In addition, sanitation tasks must be designed not to destroy electrical and mechanical components.

This presentation will provide the right mix of asset care tasks for food processing equipment. These tasks focus on condition-based (CBM) and not time-based tasks. CBM tasks look for the early signs of failure without stopping machine function like preventative tasks. Sanitation practices will be included that protect electrical and mechanical components. Companies that deploy these strategies will be shown to improve safety, overall equipment effectiveness, and production costs. Reliable assets improve safety records and produce predictable supply chains. They provide for the owner a competitive advantage through reduced maintenance costs and improved uptime.