How Plant & Maintenance Managers Can Meet Multiple Targets

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Plant and maintenance managers in the food and beverage sector face multiple, potentially conflicting targets. Meeting them calls not for one strategy, but for many tactics. David Oliver, Channel and Platform Development Manager at SKF, explains.

*David Oliver, Channel & Platform Development Manager at SKF*

Operational leaders in the food and beverage sector have a lot on their plates. Every decision they make can have an impact on numerous different aspects of plant, and corporate performance. Each must be considered in the light of its contribution to a growing, and increasingly demanding, list of goals and targets.

At the top of that list is safety, based around ever tougher compliance requirements, and the recognition that the repercussions of a safety failure go far beyond the direct costs of the incident itself. Research has shown, for example, that after a safety or health recall of a food product, 55 percent of consumers might switch brands at least temporarily, and one in six say they will never purchase the product again.

Then there is the need to ensure that all production assets are managed to maximise yield, productivity and profitability. And increasingly, corporate strategies are also being defined by targets for environmental performance and sustainability. Most major food and beverage players have set themselves challenging targets for a range of metrics including water consumption, waste production and greenhouse gas emissions.

Optimising production in this complex environment calls for a holistic perspective. Managers must be able to evaluate their choices of technology, processes and operating parameters at the macro level, considering them in terms of their impact on the entire value chain.

At the same time, however, the decisions that make a difference to top level targets will largely take place at a micro level, requiring an extremely granular understanding of the details of the products and manufacturing equipment involved.

Thinking that way is hard, requiring companies to focus on small details and a philosophy of relentless continuous improvement. But the payoffs can be significant.

Like today’s leading athletes, the best food and beverage companies now understand that world-beating performance comes as the result of the accumulation of marginal gains. Let’s look at a few examples of the kinds of changes that contribute to that approach.

Energy consumption

Measures that reduce energy consumption can make a direct contribution to both cost and sustainability targets. And with many food and beverage plants containing hundreds or thousands of items of powered equipment, small improvements to each can accumulate rapidly into big savings.

Installing variable speed drives (VSDs) on the motors used to power pumps, mixers and handling equipment, for example, can reduce their energy consumption by around 30 percent.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, VSDs were seen as a luxury. Now, they are widely used and are delivering lower energy bills for large swathes of the manufacturing sector.

Companies that have bought VSDs are saving on their electricity bills – and are prepared for ever-tightening legislation, as they are working ahead of the curve on sustainability.

Another simple energy saving change is the switch from standard ball bearings to their energy efficient (E2) equivalents. The reason is simple: friction. E2 bearings have been redesigned to reduce friction while maintaining life and cut bearing losses by 30 percent.

The way equipment is set up can have as much of an impact on energy consumption as its design. SKF engineers were recently called into one food and beverage plant to look at 12 pumps, for example, which were exhibiting high levels of vibration and rapid wear.

The team identified poor shaft alignment as the root cause of the issue. After precision alignment, not only were noise, vibration and reliability improved, but the energy consumption of the pumps was reduced by as much as 20% in one case, and by 16 percent on average.

The fix saved the company more than 9,000kWh per year in electricity consumption in each pump, and reduced its annual CO2 emissions by 28 tones a year across all 12.

Maintenance and reliability

Equipment maintenance and reliability is another area where best practice can drive significant improvements across multiple performance dimensions.

As pumps wear, their efficiency can drop by 10 to 15%, for example, and loose drive belts on fans or blowers can increase energy consumption by 20 percent. Leaks in compressed air systems can force compressors to run for longer, driving up energy costs and accelerating wear.

Then there’s the impact of unplanned stoppages due to equipment breakdown. Compared with planned maintenance interventions, unexpected stoppages often cost three times as much to fix, and take five times longer.

And in the event of an unscheduled stoppage, most plants will leave the vast majority of equipment running while repairs are made. As a result, the energy consumed per unit produced can rise dramatically as plant reliability falls.

Smarter, condition-based maintenance approaches can help food and beverage companies to identify equipment problems earlier, allowing them to intervene before performance degrades significantly, or breakdowns occur.

As a further benefit, such approaches can also reduce the amount of unnecessary preventative maintenance required in a plant, reducing spares consumption, saving labour costs and boosting equipment availability.

Maintenance teams now have access to a wide range of highly sophisticated condition monitoring tools, from vibration analysis to identify bearing damage or alignment problems to thermal imaging and dynamic electrical testing equipment for motors.

Moreover, smart data analysis technologies are making such tools quicker and easier to use, allowing them to be operated by front line staff, rather than specialists.

A new generation of online systems can even monitor equipment condition continuously without human intervention, alerting personnel only when potential issues are identified.

SKF in food industry — *Bearings in the food industry*

Lubrication and wash-down

Hygienic wash-downs are a regulatory requirement in any food plant. But washing grease-lubricated bearings can result in water ingress into to the bearing, and the discharge of grease into the production environment. To prevent corrosion or premature wear, it is common for bearings to require re-lubrication after every wash-down.

Over time, this cycle of repeated cleaning and re-lubrication can result in significant financial and environmental costs. Beyond the value of the lubricant itself, re-lubrication requires significant labour input and generates contaminated materials – from gloves to cleaning cloths – that will typically go to landfill. Grease contamination also adversely affects the quality of a plant’s wastewater, driving up water treatment or disposal costs.

Tackling challenges of this kind also requires changes at a very granular level. High efficiency seals can reduce water ingress into bearings, reducing re-lubrication intervals.

Automated lubrication systems can precisely control the quantity and location of lubricants, reducing consumption, minimising contamination risk and saving labour.

Perhaps most significantly, a new generation of re-lubrication-free and lubricated for life bearing technologies can allow companies to break the wash-down/re-lubrication cycle for good.

The examples above are just a small fraction of the micro-scale improvement opportunities that food and beverage companies can in their quest to meet ever more stringent – and complex – macro-level targets.

Indeed, our research suggests that changes at the tactical, operational level can have many times the impact of larger strategic changes, like the choice of basic process technology.

The challenge for most food companies, therefore, lies not in finding a one-hit solution for their operational problems, but in building a culture where marginal gains are sought, captured and sustained by everyone in the organisation, from front line operators to senior management.

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Indeed, our research suggests that changes at the tactical, operational level can have many times the impact of larger strategic changes, like the choice of basic process technology.