Production is king, so maintenance personnel are lucky to get an hour per month on the equipment for fine-tuning, says JBT FoodTech’s Hanssen. “Yet you cannot run this way profitability, so food and beverage companies have to build in the time for preventive and predictive maintenance. Maintenance and production work more closely together,” continues Hanssen.
Next year, the firm will introduce to the US its PRoCARE support plan that determines the true cost of downtime by highlighting all the aspects of downtime and tying them to the loss of profit, according to Hanssen.
When equipment breaks, downtime estimates need to take into account all the labor involved, from the operators standing around while the equipment is shut down, to the technician flown in to service the machinery, to overtime labor required to make up for lost production time.
PRoCARE bundles inspection agreements, consumables and training into a unified maintenance and service package. It is a collaborative tool that brings production/operation and maintenance staffers to the table and shows the benefits of information collaboration between the groups.
PRoCARE, which has been available in Europe since 2011 and now has more than 100 agreements, is offered at two service levels. The first includes parts discounts and basic inspections for smaller companies that are more independent and do things themselves. A second level targets mid-tier firms looking to partner with JBT FoodTech for higher levels of preventive and predictive monitoring and reporting, as well as training, upgrades and in-depth inspection. On the horizon is a third tier that includes full-service operating leases that can be positioned so a JBT FoodTech customer pays a fee to lease the equipment or it pays JBT to maintain the predictive equipment in the plant.
JBT FoodTech has added real-time preventive maintenance capability, allowing a large volume of data generated by the asset to be uploaded to a cloud server and downloaded to desktops or smart phones. Data related to production and preventive maintenance can be collected, organized and sent with the capability.
