Food & Beverage Asset Performance Management: Best Practices

Improve or lay down the foundation of your asset management by documenting your equipment. Their location, specifications, spare parts, (functional) asset hierarchy and of course their data. Building a master asset list including history data on the asset functions as a baseline for your APM.

The next step is often quite a challenge. Next to physical information about the assets you would also want to gather, connect and utilize all available data from assets. Collecting and analyzing operational data is crucial for asset performance management, as it enables you to improve asset reliability, prevent bottlenecks, and optimize efficiency. The transactional data can be found in your CMMS or EAM system and for many companies this is where it ends. However, to continuously improve the reliability of the assets, SCADA, MES, Historians and other OT generated data is also more valuable to understand, predict and improve asset behavior. Therefore, collaboration between departments to connect systems and deliver data output in one unified way is important to provide a proper overview of all asset data. Once unified, data analytics can be applied to this data to gain actionable insights and drive continuous improvement in asset performance. Real time monitoring also plays a key role by providing immediate visibility into asset health and performance, enabling early detection of issues and supporting predictive maintenance. When having achieved this task, you have taken the first step towards setting and being able to measure asset management key performance indicators.

Overmaintaining can have big consequences as food production machines need to shutdown too long or too often which impacts the availability and reliability of production performance. Determining asset criticality will help in finding the right balance for your maintenance activities. Use asset criticality ranking to score all assets based on the likelihood and the consequence of failure. Include factors such as safety, product quality and environmental impact, mean time between failure (MTBF), asset replacement value, probability of failure and so on. Monitoring asset health is crucial for early fault detection and helps prioritize maintenance activities more effectively. Use the analysis to prioritize your maintenance tasks and determine the level of attention an asset should get. This can make a big difference when also taking into account that the equipment in food and beverage manufacturing consists of complex physical assets and is usually part of an intricately connected system with conveyors, fasteners, filler machines and such. Implementing asset performance management strategies can further optimize operations and reduce downtime in food and beverage manufacturing.

Your CMMS or EAM system can be a powerful tool to boost your results. By implementing these systems, food and beverage manufacturers can significantly improve operational efficiency, optimizing processes and reducing downtime across production lines. It can facilitate scheduling and planning, controls inventory, work order management and of course asset management. Leveraging the CMMS to aid in maximizing asset performance down the line, however, requires discipline from the workforce and usually protocols on how to all use the system in the same way such as on how to log and manage data. These systems also help reduce costs by enabling better maintenance planning and more efficient resource allocation. Additionally, they enhance production efficiency by minimizing delays and optimizing workflows throughout the manufacturing process.

Setting up a proper CMMS or EAM build, connecting data and building risk based maintenance plans are a really good start. These actions can boost the performance of your production lines to an acceptable level and balance the efforts of your maintenance team between corrective and preventive activities. For continuous improvement potential add in equipment behavior analysis and subsequent actions. Leveraging advanced analytics and monitoring enables predictive quality, allowing you to anticipate and improve product outcomes while maintaining high operational efficiency.

It is essential to a best-in-class APM approach to understand equipment behavior, review and improve maintenance activities and act upon learnings. Failure analysis is an indispensable brick of the house of asset performance. A thorough, tested method for failure analysis or Root Cause Analysis (RCA) should be used to fundamentally change the way of working. Implementing APM strategies helps optimize maintenance, prevent failures, and address production bottlenecks. In the context of maintenance and corrective actions, minimizing downtime is crucial to maintaining consistent production flow and maximizing uptime.

Working in a FMCG plant requires specific skills and capabilities; an eagerness to deliver quality work, and a strong work ethic that focuses on meticulous, high-standard results to name just two. On top of these traits, to be able to continuously improve productivity and product quality, you need people that can handle change. Adjusting to a new and multidisciplinary way of working requires a huge amount of flexibility and motivation of the workforce. Be sure to create an open company culture, a project buy in on all work levels, provide coaching and objective facilitation from an outside company in order for adoption to be swift and easy for all. As one of our customers lately said: 'We don't want heroes anymore, we want people who don't like surprises but are not afraid to change'.