The problem
A large bread manufacturer within the UK were experiencing frequent breakdowns on critical assets, resulting in a significant loss of production. The site was working on a run to fail basis, which led to the maintenance team repairing the same assets, multiple times each month. Resulting in a vast amount of their time spent repairing the same assets, urgently. A solution was needed that suited this site and their team.
Solution
After being approached by AVT Reliability®, the food manufacturer were presented with possible options to reduce their asset downtime. It was agreed the best option for the customer, was a complete condition monitoring service provided by AVT Reliability®. This service included a full site assessment and access to an expert reliability engineer from AVT Reliability®. The Condition Monitoring service provided included four site visit days per month to collect, analyse and report on the data.
During this time, AVT Reliability® implemented Machine Sentry® sensors on all rotating assets. This enabled all vibration data to be uploaded to the Machine Sentry® Portal wirelessly via Bluetooth® on an Android™ tablet or phone. By implementing Machine Sentry® it also allows other asset information such as oil analysis and visual inspection information to be inputted; enabling AVT and the bread manufacturer engineers to see a complete view of an asset’s health.
Within the Machine Sentry® Portal, ADA™ the Automated Diagnostic Assistant will highlight any potential faults, along with additional support from AVT Reliability’s experts to give recommendations for the site engineers to complete. This enables the engineers to implement proactive maintenance plans and prevent premature failure. Overall this will help to reduce the amount of hours the bread manufacturer spends repairing assets, increases production time and help to improve asset health.
The below snippet of the Machine Sentry® Portal shows that 50% of the recommended actions are predictive.
Savings
| Total Amount Spent | Resultant saved amount | |
|---|---|---|
| Planned labour. | £12,985 | £16,856 43% saved |
| Unplanned labour. | £29,841 | |
| Planned materials. | £21,315 | £48,755 30% saved |
| Unplanned materials. | £70,070 | |
| Total amount saved. | £65,611 66% saved |
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From our Machine Sentry® Portal on average, 14% of assets are likely to fail in the food and beverage industry. The below table includes savings based on 49 failures throughout the year for the above bread manufacturer.