{"id":9221,"date":"2017-09-12T03:00:03","date_gmt":"2017-09-12T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/12\/news-2994\/"},"modified":"2017-09-12T03:00:03","modified_gmt":"2017-09-12T11:00:03","slug":"news-2994","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/12\/news-2994\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Improve Food Manufacturing Safety by Increasing Asset Reliability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Guest Blogger| Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 09:13:53 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Dan Miklovic, Research Fellow, LNS Research<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Dan Miklovic joined LNS Research in May of 2014 and is now a Research Fellow, his primary focus is research and development in the Asset and Energy Management practices.\u00a0<\/em>Dan has over 40 years of experience in manufacturing IT, R&D, engineering, and sales across several industries.<\/em><\/p>\n

Since LNS Research has surveyed the industrial market, starting in 2013, the number one issue facing the food and beverage sector has remained compliance with the Food Safety and Modernization Act.\u00a0 Of approximately 700 responses (one-third from the beverage sector and two-thirds from food) just over 60% rank it as key issue. The impact of supply chain issues, customer preferences, raw material prices, social media and other factors range from 10% to 40% depending on industry, region, and company size.<\/p>\n

In response to these challenges, two of the three top operational objectives in the industry are #1) improve manufacturing efficiency and #3) ensure compliance of operations; the second most popular is improve customer service.\u00a0 Given the challenge of compliance, cost pressures in the industry, criticality of processing capacity during harvest, and the potentially devastating impact of product recalls, it is surprising that the food and beverage industry far lags overall manufacturing in the deployment of asset performance management<\/a> (APM) technology. Companies either have no technology, or paper- and spreadsheet-based systems, which is the case for the majority of organizations.<\/p>\n

If Industry 4.0 (also Industrie 4.0) is about the digitalization of business, perhaps no industry stands to gain more than the food and beverage sector, if they focus on the right opportunities.<\/p>\n

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To learn more about how Industry 4.0 and the IIoT are transforming manufacturing, <\/em>join this webinar<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Asset Reliability is Fundamental to Process Reliability<\/h4>\n

It seems obvious that a poorly maintained piece of equipment will perform poorly. It will break down frequently, fail to maintain performance volumes it was designed for, and potentially contribute to product contamination if failures result in foreign material introduced into the stream or the inability to maintain recipe set points, resulting in out-of-spec formulations.\u00a0 So while there is an intuitive acceptance that well-maintained equipment leads to fewer problems, it seems that companies invariably view maintenance as \u201ca necessary evil\u201d and maintenance budgets are under constant pressure.<\/p>\n

One of the primary reasons for this is that once a plant is up and running, either initially or immediately after refurbishment,\u00a0 it will continue to run for quite some time with almost no maintenance, since equipment typically fails either during initial start-up or after some extended period of use.\u00a0 In other words, there is a honeymoon period where it is easy to default to a reactive mode, invest little, and repair only when there is the rare failure. This approach appears to succeed in meeting production volume and quality goals with minimal maintenance cost.\u00a0 The obvious problem with this thinking, however, is that ultimately wear-and-tear on equipment will have a negative impact.\u00a0 This usually leads to a major investment cycle which is doomed to repeat itself.<\/p>\n

What food and beverage companies must do instead is think of asset reliability as a financial issue that is a direct component of operational risk management. They need to recognize that asset reliability is the foundation of process reliability. Unreliable assets directly and indirectly cause unreliable production processes, unreliable safety processes, unreliable environmental processes and unreliable sustainability processes.<\/p>\n

Instead of just thinking about lost production because an asset is unavailable, organizations should consider the assets\u2019 contribution relative to people and process safety, energy and utilities usage, environmental performance and product integrity.<\/p>\n

In the food and beverage industry Operational Excellence is built upon six pillars:<\/p>\n