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Large food manufacturers often have teams running Preventative Maintenance Schedules (PMS). This saves the business precious time and money. With contractors now servicing small to medium businesses, Preventative Maintenance Schedules have been made available to all businesses.
Prevention is always better than a cure but many small to medium manufacturing plants only have time to run reactive maintenance, costing thousands of dollars in wasted produce and downtime.
Smart Engineering & Technologies performs Preventative Maintenance Schedules for small to medium businesses in the food and packaging industry and has seen positive changes to their clients’ productivity levels.
“People often come to us for help because their productivity levels aren’t high enough,” says Smart Engineering & Technologies co-owner, Matthew Leimgruber. “We go in there, gather information about the machines and create a schedule, according to how often machines break down and why.”
Even businesses with an existing on-site maintenance team have been using Smart Engineering’s services; “On-site maintenance teams are often kept busy fixing breakdowns and doing general reactive maintenance,” Mr Leimgruber said. “As contractors, we come in and work behind the scenes fixing faults which would otherwise cause breakdowns. We also install and program new equipment. This frees up the on-site guys and makes it possible for them to maintain a higher level of machine workability.”
As we all know, systems break down over a certain period of time. For example, a stainless steel spring in a filler may last between five and six months, depending on usage. A PMS would see that spring replaced at the five month mark (outside machine operating hours), avoiding the expensive and frustrating down time that would usually occur when the spring is simply left to wear out.
A PMS would also include machine assessments. These are carried out at regular intervals. Machine assessments sometimes uncover faults which can then be fixed before any further damage or loss of production occurs – once again, saving manufacturers time and money.
“We increase productivity by minimising machine downtime,” Mr Leimgruber explained. “Preventative maintenance allows you to work ahead of breakdowns.”