How To Shrink Food-Processing Equipment Maintenance Costs

By Sam Lewis

A key to keeping a food-processing facility running at optimum performance is routine upkeep on equipment. Preventative maintenance on your plant’s equipment is an excellent starting point to reduce costs, but there are other ways to lower overheads and keep your plant highly efficient. Here are a few questions to ask to do so.

What’s Vital, What’s Not?

Prior to making a decision to purchase food-processing equipment, speak with its manufacturer and your plant’s operators and engineers about it. Be sure to discuss whether or not suggested preventative maintenance is in fact needed, as unneeded upkeep can cause equipment malfunctions. Further, be sure to review maintenance procedures annually, making any necessary adjustments as necessary. By following this strategy, your company can get the most out of its equipment while minimizing downtime caused by breakdowns.

Is Maintenance REALLY Needed?

Food-processing equipment manufacturers offer suggested timeframes to perform maintenance and even rebuild machines. However, these recommendations may not be completely accurate with your facility’s needs. If a particular piece of equipment’s manufacturer suggests maintenance every three months, but the equipment is only running for a few, sporadic hours in that time frame, is the effort of upkeep really needed? Make sure your equipment is on a maintenance schedule applicable to its actual use.

When’s The Best Time For Maintenance?

Routine upkeep on your facility’s equipment should be just that: on a scheduled routine. Examine the patterns of productivity of each machine and schedule maintenance around downtimes. This will allow your plant to take equipment out of service at a time that won’t hinder efficiency much.

Can Employees Be More Efficient?

Any time your facility can keep maintenance and repair work in house is a time of cost savings. It may be beneficial to train food-processing employees to do these tasks on a routine basis. This will take the weight of repairs off of senior staff, and even a paid third party. Production employees should be able to clean processing equipment, complete inspections of machines and parts, and examine equipment for non-characteristic behavior. Should the machine begin to act in an uncharacteristic manner, an expert should be brought in to examine the machine and plan a course of action.

Is There An Overall Upkeep Plan?

Preventative maintenance is only one form of caring for your facility’s equipment. A complete maintenance plan for your facility’s food-processing equipment should include two other forms of upkeep: predictive maintenance — using best practices and prearranged plans to determine when a machine will need attention — and reactive maintenance — unplanned, but necessary fixes and repairs. By using all three maintenance types together can help control costs while maximizing production times and minimizing downtime.