5 Ways to Reduce Preventive Maintenance Costs in Food Processing Plants

Steve Hawkins, VP, Stellar Refrigeration Services Preventive maintenance should be one of your key strategies to keeping your plant’s assets healthy. While equipment upkeep and parts replacements are necessary, there are ways you can reduce your preventive maintenance costs without decreasing your food processing facility’s operational efficiencies.  1. Examine What’s Necessary, What’s Not When first purchasing your equipment, ensure you review its preventive maintenance requirements with the manufacturers and your subject matter experts, whether those are engineers or senior maintenance professionals. You should confirm that all of the suggested preventive maintenance is actually needed, as unnecessary preventive maintenance can actually induce equipment failure. For example, at one of our client’s plants, pumps were undergoing preventive maintenance every quarter to prevent pump failures. This maintenance was actually inducing premature failure. After engineering performed a detailed root-cause analysis, a different pump was specified and preventive maintenance was moved to a yearly event, leading to better system performance and reduced maintenance costs. By doing this we: Decreased labor costs Reduced parts purchases Increased the efficiency and overall uptime of the system  What can your food manufacturing facility learn from this? You need to have a preventive maintenance strategy and continually review that strategy based on the equipment needs.  2. Select a Suitable Measurement System Take a compressor, for example. Some companies may think they need to rebuild a compressor every three years. But what if that compressor runs only one month out of every four months? You’re basing your preventive maintenance on a calendar year, not on the compressor’s running hours.  Preventive maintenance should be performed based on the most applicable measurement system for the equipment.  3. Pick the Optimal Time to Perform Maintenance Preventive maintenance should be scheduled maintenance, tuned to the specific needs of your production schedule. This way, your […]