Proactively overcoming maintenance challenges

31 January 2021

Moving to a proactive maintenance strategy can help reduce the stress levels experienced by many maintenance teams. Suzanne Gill reports.

When it comes to equipment maintenance every industry will have its own challenges, but food and beverage manufacturers may just have more unique challenges than most other sectors!

Ed Keenan, head of process at Integrated Food Projects, highlights two of these: “Firstly, when making products for human consumption, alongside any standard health & safety regulations, there will also be a huge amount of regulation to ensure food safety for consumers.

“The second unique challenge facing the sector comes as a result of having to regularly clean equipment, which generally means that water needs to be introduced to process areas. Cleaning processes often requires the use of high-pressure hoses, and aggressive chemicals, so equipment specified for food processing applications needs to be able to cope with these harsh environments.”

According to Keenan, another challenge facing food industry engineers relates to maintenance budgets. The low cost of products created in food manufacturing can mean that there are not the same maintenance budgets available to industry sectors creating higher-value products. “The food industry does generally suffer from a lack of investment in new equipment – which is largely down to short contract durations, resulting in a lack of contract security,” continued Keenan. “This means that, often, food processors have to rely on old equipment which can present problems. In addition to becoming ever more difficult to repair, component obsolescence is an issue as it will increasingly become more difficult to source spare parts.”

Keenan went on to point out that there is often a lack of time scheduled for maintenance tasks because so many food production lines run 24/7. “While there is a legal requirement to introduce downtime for cleaning, there is no legal requirement to stop production for maintenance purposes. This can result in maintenance tasks getting pushed into the same downtime window as cleaning with maintenance teams having to work around hygiene teams.” 2020 has added a further challenge – the pandemic demands that we all observe greater social distancing, which can make it harder for teams to carry out all the tasks necessary within an already short timeframe.

Risk-based regulation

In general, UK food regulations have moved away from the traditionally prescriptive approach to a more risk-based approach, so interpretation is often left down to the manufacturer. Arguing his case for proactive maintenance, Keenan said: “The goal of every engineer involved in food production must surely be to minimise downtime and the adoption of a proactive maintenance strategy is the best way to achieve this. The number one reason to move away from any kind of reactive maintenance is to minimise unexpected downtimes and to increase profits. Proactive maintenance strategies help ensure that the engineers, and not the machines, are in control!

The advice is to focus on key assets in particular – the assets that would have the biggest impact if they failed. Moving from reactive to proactive or even predictive on these assets can result in huge reductions in downtime which would have a positive effect on productivity.

The first step to achieving this goal is to outline what you want to achieve and what you want to focus on. It is important to have a purpose and key goals. The next step is to ensure you have an asset register or an inventory that includes all the equipment or processes that will be part of the project.

“Once you understand your goals and have a list of equipment the next step is to create maintenance procedures for each of the steps. These need to be prioritised in order of where it is really worth spending time on maintenance,” said Keenan.

“I think moving to a proactive maintenance strategy increases control and reduces stress on maintenance teams, who are often under immense pressure when something goes down. Reducing that stress, I believe helps improve job satisfaction. It is a healthier way to operate – in terms of employee stress levels, productivity, and profit,” concludes Keenan.