You wouldn’t dream of embarking on a long car journey without checking your tyres, oil and fuel, yet many plant managers fail to regularly check their equipment. Here, Stephen Harding, managing director of materials management specialist Gough Engineering, explains why proactive, rather than reactive, maintenance is key to reducing downtime.
In the food industry, machines are often used around the clock, with little time for unscheduled downtime. This means that the machines must operate at optimal performance and plant managers need to be well aware of the condition of the machines.
When moving items around the factory, whether through bucket elevators, conveyors or vibratory feeders, it is important that these machines are in working order, or else production may stop entirely. Despite this, many plant managers fail to schedule in planned shutdowns to allow maintenance to take place.
Gough Engineering
Often, maintenance is carried out after a machine has broken down. However, every minute of halted production is costly, particularly in the food industry. Having a reactive maintenance policy rather than a proactive one means that there is a forced shutdown and is not good practice.
Therefore, even when considering purchasing new materials handling equipment, plant managers must consider how they plan to maintain it. An important step in this process is choosing the right supplier to source the product from, where the experience of the manufacturer can be trusted.
Having an inventory of operational spare parts can also make it easier for trained engineers in the plant to quickly repair the broken part. Without this safety stock, the entire plant could come to a stop for the sake of a single component.
While engineers from Gough Engineering are available to come and repair parts, having scheduled shutdowns for maintenance means that they can be there as a planned production intervention to minimise disruption, rather than engineers waiting for a specialist to travel through the night.
By choosing an experienced supplier with a service department, plant managers can be assured that their equipment will be regularly looked after. At Gough Engineering, the employees that visit the plant for maintenance work are often the same employees who build the machines, meaning they have the expert knowledge to maintain them.
In the food industry, it is inevitable that parts will start to wear out from long service. In this case, by factoring in planned shutdowns, regularly scheduled maintenance visits to the site give specialists the opportunity to spot and replace wearing parts before they suddenly break and stop production. For example, Gough Engineering offers a fast remeshing service for screens and sieves and can also overhaul and adjust the drive mechanisms of bucket elevators.
Food plants also risk accidental damage when machines are dismantled and reassembled for cleaning to comply with hygiene regulations. This is often done during the evening by occasional contract staff that haven’t been trained effectively in how to do it.
Often, the machines may not be put back correctly or components are dropped or damaged, leading to breakages or poorly functioning equipment. After every period of cleaning, equipment should be checked prior to reinstating production. Although this does add slightly to the shutdown time but may avoid extended periods of unplanned shutdown.
With materials management machines such as conveyors and sieves forming the backbone of the factory, production cannot continue if they come to a halt. It is therefore vital that plant engineers consider the total cost of ownership of their equipment and invest in those that come from a reputable supplier, with an effective and frequent servicing programme.