Asset Priority Setting for Maintenance Management in the Food Industry

Abstract

The food industry is associated with high food standards and concerns that lead to a very competitive environment to which organizations respond with volume production strategies. These productions are ensured by advanced and complex equipment, which needs to be in optimal working conditions to meet the demands. Thus, unexpected failures leading to emergency stoppages in production and non-compliance with production plans should be avoided at all costs.This work consists in the development and application of a practical and structured method of equipment classification criticality based on its importance for the productive process, which culminated in the equipment classification into three categories (A, B and C). This method included five factors: Quality, Availability, Safety and Environment, Costs and Technological Complexity. It was applied to four different factories (a semolina factory, two pasta factories and a cookie factory) of a leading food group in Portugal. The classification of these assets into three categories allowed the definition of strategies for approach by category, which motivated the application of a methodology of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), revision of Preventive Maintenance Plans (PMP), integration of critical asset in Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) and many others. In order to validate the obtained results, an analysis and comparison of the results for the different factories under study were carried out.