Food and beverage is an industry that runs in good times and bad, because we will always need food. But compared to many other industries, the profitability pressures are higher. Whether you bottle soft drinks or make pasta, the margins are tight, and the level of regulation is in a league of its own.
Food safety, regulations and margins set the non-negotiable boundaries for your production. What you can decide is how you work inside them: reactively, always a little behind and in distress, or with proactive maintenance, one step ahead.
Here are 3 practical examples of how your maintenance practices affect the whole plant.
When you pasteurise milk or orange juice, you have a measurement in that batch. Regulations require you to track the temperature as you produce, so you notice quite fast if something happens.
But before you can measure anything in the orange juice, the machine has already done its work, or failed to. When the batch shows an unacceptable temperature, you have to figure out what to do with the juice that can’t be used as such. It could end up going to waste.
The reactive reality?
“Oh, typical, the pasteurisation was not as good as it should be. Sometimes that happens.”
Many plants have heard that sentence so often that they have stopped seeing it as a choice.
The proactive way is to make sure the equipment doing the pasteurisation is so good that you never find the problem in the product.
You monitor the machinery in detail. When the first signs show, they turn into a work order. You act on it while the pasteuriser still holds its temperature, and the batches stay both safe and profitable.
Take ice cream, another product where you shouldn’t mess with temperatures or the batch is gone. And even if the variation is within the safe boundaries, you are still losing margin.
Say you have to keep your factory’s deep-freeze rooms at minus 24°C. If the seal on the door doesn’t work as it should, the room drifts towards minus 22°C. Your compressor gives everything to get back to minus 24°C. If you only look at the end result, no one notices the difference.
Meanwhile, that compressor consumes more electricity, and the margin on every single ice cream gets smaller and smaller. Over days and weeks, the extra energy also shows up in your environmental figures.
Think of it as traffic lights. Minus 24°C is green, minus 23°C is amber, and minus 22°C and warmer is red. Act on the amber light, with a task in your maintenance system, so the room never reaches red. And remember to keep a proactive eye on all moving parts, not only the compressor.
The rules in food and beverage get sharper all the time. Often it is because something happened at another brand in the industry, and the regulators don’t want it to happen anywhere else. Sometimes you get 2 years to implement a new regulation, sometimes 3 months. And if you don’t do it, you cannot sell anything.
Look at the equipment in a food plant over 20 years and you will see how much has changed. Every new rule means modifications and improvements to your machines, and every modification has to be documented, so you know it lives up to the regulation.
That information belongs in your CMMS: what you changed on which machine, when, and which rule it answers.
Then, when an inspection comes, you can show everything you do: we read the new regulation, we understood it, and we implemented it.
You can be proactive here too. If you see the EU going in the direction of a new regulation, embrace it before. When the deadline comes, you can say: “Oh, no problem, we did that a year ago.” And your CMMS documentation proves it.
Most production and technical managers know that CMMS software exists. Many think that if they had a new CMMS, everything would be great. But if you have one and use it only to log what already broke, you stay reactive. The switch has to happen in how you see maintenance’s role.
Food safety, regulations and thin margins are here to stay. Inside those boundaries, proactive maintenance is how you make really good products in a profitable way. So the next time a batch goes in the bin in your plant, listen for the sentence. Will someone say “sometimes that happens”?