PET Food Processing - September 2018 - 63

OPERATIONS

What could go

WRONG

Recommended preventive
maintenance, signs of wear
and predictive technology
help processors avoid
unexpected downtime.

By Jennifer Semple | jsemple@sosland.com

Maintaining overall equipment effectiveness requires pet
food and treat processors to use all the tools at their disposal from basic common sense to sophisticated algorithms that identify abnormal high-frequency vibrations.
Effectively planning and anticipating required maintenance
can increase production output, decrease downtime, lower
maintenance costs, improve allocation of inventory, reduce
labor costs and minimize quality issues.
A corporate culture committed to preempting equipment failure supports exchanging minutes spent now on
preventive maintenance to save hours in unplanned downtime later. "The pet food industry, in our view, is growing at a very fast pace," says Kate Rome, president, Rome
Grinding Solutions, Sheldon, Iowa. "The customers that we
currently service, in order to keep up with the high demand
of their products, cannot afford to have their equipment
out of service for any length of time. So preventive and
planned maintenance is a very high priority."
Equipment manufacturers provide training, recommended maintenance schedules and built-in features to
initiate and track maintenance activities. While preventive
and diagnostic features vary with each type of processing
equipment, one of the most common and useful features
is also the most basic. "The equipment has messages that
show up on the operator panel saying what routine maintenance needs to be performed," says Patrick Ditchfield, executive vice president, Reiser, Canton, Massachusetts. "Doing
this basic routine maintenance work is probably the most
important thing a processor can do to keep in production."
For a lot of processing equipment, basic routines start

with a daily visual inspection and focusing on all the lubrication points. "You have to lubricate every day. That's absolutely a top priority," says Brian Garber, director of systems
integration, FPEC, Springdale, Arkansas. "As you're doing
that, visually inspect the equipment and look at things
like the bearings and make sure they aren't walking out of
their seat." Lubricating a tumbler or a mixer takes between
5 and 15 minutes daily at the start of every shift according to Garber. "A maintenance person doing that should
know it by heart. For our typical machine, it takes just a few
minutes each day."
A little attention on a regular basis goes a long way toward
getting the optimal performance out of equipment. "Many
of the components and wearable parts that we include on
our equipment have wear markers built in to their design,"
Rome says. "This gives the customer a noticeable reference
to when parts should be replaced before the equipment
fails completely. These wearable parts, if changed at the appropriate time, will prevent any substantial downtime and
will save the customer the cost of repairing or replacing the
larger and more expensive components."

The most sophisticated
systems send prompts
to perform preventive
maintenance by email
or text but the majority
of systems are a simple
pop-up on the screen or
a report that runs daily
or weekly.
FPEC

Understand the signs
Equipment can indicate when maintenance or repairs are
needed if you know what the indicators mean. "By measuring the weight of every piece produced with a volumetric
food pump or attachment, and calculating the trend in the
standard deviation, it is possible to see that items in the
pumping system are wearing out and need to be replaced,"
Ditchfield says. "If the pumping elements of the volumetric

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PET Food Processing - September 2018

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