Machine downtime truly hurts the food and beverage sector—here’s how to reduce it by 40 percent

Downtime significantly impacts the bottom line in manufacturing—costing companies as much as $260,000 per hour, according to Aberdeen Research. Unplanned downtime is often a result of knowledge gaps involved with machine/shift changeover or machine operations directly. Training and experience significantly improve these areas of operations inefficiencies. Unplanned machine downtime is another culprit. Critical machinery that breaks down or stays down at the wrong time can cause operations downtime that impacts revenue, product quality, and even corporate reputation.    Especially in plants that produce a high volume of goods, continually, and are in regulated industries such as food and beverage.

Some major issues caused by downtime include:

• Food quality risks, such as accidentally using the wrong ingredients, cooking food at the wrong temperature, or machinery defaults that could leave food spoiled
• Health and safety risks for employees
• In industries using chemicals, downtime could be lethal for workers or even consumers unexpectedly exposed to toxic materials
  

Based on historical customer data, our real-time machine analytics platform reduces downtime by nearly 40% within the first 12 months of going live in a facility. Not only that, LLumin’s platform reduces customers’ mean time to repair (MTTR) score—which measures the average time it takes to recover from a system or machine failure—by nearly 20% within two years of implementing our CMMS platform. Monitoring machines in real-time and triggering preventive maintenance before faults and downtime occur is an increasingly important part of how manufacturers thrive and succeed.

Reducing downtime is important. It speaks to the integrity of an organization’s processes and operations model. However, now, more than ever, in the midst of ongoing labor shortages and supply chain challenges, companies must be especially diligent. 

And so, the best are turning to advanced technologies to minimize and reduce downtime, using machine learning and predictive analytics.

You want to choose a CMMS built around your processes and your operations model.  However, you also want a CMMS that can elevate your operations and process optimization strategy by incorporating analytics and data. But where to begin?

Here is what we focus on at LLumin, which helps our customers hit the ground running and reduce downtime (and other inefficiencies along the way):

• Do away with paper and complicated screens

LLumin accommodates paperless approvals and signoffs. It also automates and submits work orders for spares as parts are consumed.

• Visualize assets and their status in real time

LLumin’s Facility View displays every machine in your business, and you can check current vitals with a click.

• Automatically mitigate downtime

Any critical change in machine vitals will trigger the necessary maintenance activities without requiring you to lift a finger.

• Reliably predict … anything

With our software, you can assess the cost and risk of failure of each machine across your operation. For example, you can predict whether your team will meet their performance benchmarks for the month or predict when to make your next hire.

• Meet performance benchmarks, full stop

This is all completed without forcing your team to change the way they do things. Basically, LLumin will give you control over the things you’re already responsible for controlling.

We have an IoT-enabled CMMS solution that provides proactive maintenance, which is a combination of preventative and predictive maintenance. Proactive maintenance supports time, usage, and condition-based maintenance approaches, all of which can be deployed simultaneously.

Learn more about the LLumin Honed Implementation Process (HIP). It helps organizations move forward with our software solution quickly and efficiently.