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  • 1.  Food industry extended production schedules

    Posted 07-12-2019 04:44 PM
    ​I'd like to see a conversation around Preventive Maintenance within the food industry (heavy proteins) where 16-18 hours of production are ran daily with 6 hours of sanitation cleaning completed nightly. Often run schedules require production to run 6 and sometime 7 day a week. How are Reliability & Maintenance Best Practices handle within your organization?

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    Michael Clark
    Associate Director Maintenance & Reliability Engineer
    Fayetteville AR
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  • 2.  RE: Food industry extended production schedules

    Posted 07-15-2019 07:31 PM
    Hi James,
    I worked with a client in the seafood industry that deals with exactly the same sort of production schedules as you have described. And we worked on building PM programs on not only their stationary equipment, such as compressors, freezers, etc., but also the various modules that are utilized in their production lines. 

    With respect to R&M Best Practices, the PM programs had a major focus on the "running inspections" of the modules being utilized in the production lines to detect problems early and generate backlog from those inspections. Then, in working with Production, specific modules would be scheduled to be idle during scheduled production runs where the work from the backlog would be addressed. 

    Terry Taylor
    IDCON INC
    919-537-2812

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    Terry Taylor
    Senior Consultant
    IDCON INC
    Raleigh NC
    t.taylor@idcon.com
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Food industry extended production schedules

    Posted 07-16-2019 06:48 AM
    ​I think you can do the Preventive Maintenance during the cleaning.

    I am sure there will be opportunities to do some inspection while the production guys are cleaning.


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    Augustine Amoako-Awuah
    Tema GA
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    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Food industry extended production schedules

    Posted 07-16-2019 07:40 AM
    I worked in a food plant running 7 days a week with 20 hour production and 4 hour cleaning.  ​You usually have conflicts with the cleaning crews so it is hard to get any time scheduled during cleaning, plus a lot of the work during a PM will require them to clean again.  We were able to get a few done at this time with some coordination, but it was very restrictive.  We also worked to get productions buy in on completing PM's through education on cost savings and reduced DT.  As a result we were able to schedule the PM's right before the cleaning process after the production runs by scheduling the lines to go down early.  There are also windows of opportunity if you are creative and have everyone looking for them.  The production and maintenance supervisors were to watch for any DT events or windows of opportunity to where we could complete some of the PM work.   
    The running inspections were very important to make sure we were getting everything fixed and a lot of the PM activities were inspections.  I did PM evaluation to break them down into manageable sections that required less DT per event and move all the non-DT tasks outside the PM.  This made it easier to get time for PM's.   We could also get some PM's done that did not impact cleaning as they were preparing for start ups and shut downs.
    All PM's were calculated into the OEE numbers so we were tasked to reduce the impact of the PM's on production.

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    Gary Ennis
    Reliability Engineer
    Beech-Nut Nutrition Company
    Amsterdam NY
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    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Food industry extended production schedules

    Posted 07-16-2019 02:33 PM
    Well, I've been in the Food Industry, and many others.  Production, Production, Production!!!  I can't tell you how many times I've seen where production would not schedule their assets for preventive maintenance.  However, all of these times, Maintenance did not have their sandbox cleaned up.  When performing a Preventive Maintenance Optimization​, we do four (4) things; 1) Review existing PMs and eliminate Non-Value Added Tasks.  2) Identify those tasks that should be replaced by Condition Based Monitoring, or PdM.  3) Identify those tasks that could be performed by Operations - Operator Care.  4) Load-Level all PMs throughout the year, making sure we have not overloaded any week or month.

    While the PMO initiative is in progress, Operations needs to be thinking about how they can schedule production runs and "Scheduled Downtime".  Most production plants have been running 24/7 for so long with minimal scheduled downtime, running a process to failure, or at a significant decrease in product output, it has become normal.  The old saying - "If its been going on long enough, it becomes normal".  I'm sure all of you have been through this, and may be going through it now.  Are we having maintenance put a patch on something to get back running again?  How many times have we done this?  Start looking at these unscheduled downtime events and ask yourself these four (4) very important questions:

    1)  How long have we known about the defect that caused this problem?

    2)  How many opportunities have we had to deal with this issue since we learned about it?

    3)  How much would it have cost us to deal with this immediately upon learning about it?

    4)  What changes to our processes and procedures do we need to make to ensure we never again find ourselves in this position?

    So, we need to ask ourselves, do we come down scheduled, which has been proved time and time again.  Or, do we want to come down catastrophically, which has been proven to cost at least five (5) times more, and with collateral damage.

    Operations needs to assume ownership of their Assets.  If they do not Schedule their assets for the PM tasks identified during the PM Optimization Initiative, Then you could say that they are authorizing the "Pre-distruction of their assets or process.
    Operations says they have to run to meet their customer's demand.  If they loose ground by way of catastrophic failure of their assets or processes, this will be far more detrimental.

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    Elton Ebersole CMRP, CPPM
    Senior Reliability Professional
    Allied Reliability Group Inc.
    Fairless Hills PA
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Food industry extended production schedules

    Posted 07-17-2019 03:41 PM
    I am not as familiar with the meats industry. I know in the bakery manufacturing world we implemented several things that helped us turn the corner. A lot depends on where you are at. One thing we were able to do was work with sanitation and have them do a short spray down of the machines we we were going to work on then dig into our PM or proactive repairs. As someone suggested earlier we also, had a lot of running PMs. Target the highest offenders for downtime and making sure you get them running more reliably can be a huge help. Less downtime equals more uptime. It causes a little bit of conflict (but in a good way) if you can get all concerned manufacturing managers and the plant manager to sit down with the heads of Reliability and Maintenance as well as stake holders from the planning and production to develop plans. Having FSQA at some outage planning meetings was beneficial. 

    I got a lot of traction from working with sanitation  developing the cleaning plans so, maintenance and sanitation weren't at the same places at the same time. This is not as easy as it sounds but, can have a huge payback if sanitation and maintenance can get on the same page.
    Before anything else  buyin and planning are key. It really helps to have everyone know what the goals are first. Tying the reliability efforts to the production/company goals is key. Secondly without planning that is robust on the priority equipment you are bound to fail.

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    VERNON WELCH
    Athens AL
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    Original Message