CMMS Software: Will Work for Food

Maintenance budgets tend to be about the same year after year. One year, however, the budget may place a little more emphasis on replacing old components, the next on reducing downtime, says James Jones, product manager for Alpharetta, Ga.-based Infor’s EAM Solutions (www.infor.com). Therefore companies shouldn’t expect a “pure ROI based on maintenance spending for materials or labor — the budget doesn’t dissipate just because you installed a maintenance system. You spend differently; you spend smarter.”

Pat Conroy, president and founder of MicroMain Corp., Austin, Texas — the system at HP Hood — expects the FDA to lead to greater food plant regulations “due to the salmonella and other food safety issues we’ve all seen in the news. They are going to get tougher, and inspections are going to get more frequent.” He notes that his system ships with 500 standard reports plus source code for IT-savvy users to modify as well as offering customization services.

Nelson says few if any reports of this nature have been customized, although there are plenty of food processes that call for documentation that goes beyond parts and work orders. For example, the HP Hood plant’s ultra-high temperature processing lines are subject to the FDA Pasteurized Milk Ordinance as well as state regulations. Maintenance departments must maintain all the equipment involved in meeting the ordinance — from motors, drives, sensors and valves to the larger mechanical and automation systems they comprise.

“If we don’t maintain all of those things, we can’t run the plant. The state would shut us down,” says Nelson. Instead, his personnel do inspections more frequently than required, document their work in the system and catch problems before a failure is imminent.

Cross-functional footprint

“Maintenance has gotten incredibly complex,” says Craig Miller, who spent 19 years at a large baking plant and was president of the users group of the Maintimizer CMMS from Ashcom Technologies, Ann Arbor, Mich., before becoming that company’s sales and business development manager. Decades ago, he says, “All a maintenance manager had to worry about was getting the job done by the end of the day. Today, it’s all hands on deck.”

He says companies should start with their own regulations, standards and practices before diving into the software. “Say you’ve got a 50-ft.-long Teledyne Readco oven with brownies going through it. Your CMMS details the asset — the oven, combustion details, model number, serial number, what parts are on it ... what's been replaced, performance trends to analyzed. All your PMs [preventine maintenance] would be generated based on that information, with frequency and tasks defined by and based on standard operating procedures.

“The system can't just say ‘check conveyor.’ Well, check it for what? Because if an oven’s down in a bakery, you could lose days of production.”

There is a possibility that CMMS/EAM systems can become a cross-functional documentation across the plant. Management mandates to conserve budgets and information technology standards are factors that could hasten such integration.

Infor’s Jones notes a gradual movement toward centralized document repositories. He sees further cross-functional features becoming more important as maintenance work flows better coordinate with production systems so, for example, PMs can be scheduled without interrupting manufacturing. By assigning a set of production resources that would be impacted by a given piece of equipment, he says, the system can tell the user how production processes, people and productivity will be affected.

While Infor has proprietary methods for this, others confirm the importance of production-and-maintenance synergy.

“If the marketing and sales guys sell a major order to an account like ShopRite or Acme [supermarket chains],” Hood’s Nelson says, “we don’t promise the world and then have trouble meeting the orders. Our system has supported us in the ability to maximize our capacity and be able to identify what our capability is.”

Note to Compliance Managers Plant Wide

Every food plant has its own standards and practices, and a CMMS may provide new opportunities to bring cross-functional departments together to eliminate duplication of efforts and software systems.