Baking & Snack - November 2023 - 88

MAINTENANCE
trained to remove the belt, clean the crumbs out of the
bearings and replace it without the help of sanitation.
On more complex maintenance projects, the two crews
work hand-in-hand with the entire department under
the same leadership.
" The technical service manager is running all 'downday
activities' as head of the technical support team, " Mr.
Tilghman said. " We don't have a sanitation manager or a
plant engineer, but we do have a technical service manager
who has a 'dotted line' to the director of food safety,
compliance and regulatory. "
With changeovers, he explained, production operators
are trained to clean, lube and inspect equipment and
do routine tasks such as changing a slicer blade before
it breaks. Mechanics then conduct " doctors' rounds, "
where they check in with operators every hour, no matter
if the line is running or not. During these rounds, the
mechanics receive feedback from operators and document
concerns about bearing noise, overheated motors,
bagger performance, divider accuracy and more. This
focus frees up maintenance time and labor by monitoring
the health of a production line in a more preventive
than reactive way.
" It's like checking your blood pressure or cholesterol
levels, " Mr. Tilghman said. " You don't want to wait to
have a heart attack. Go get the bloodwork done routinely
and monitor your pressure. "
Mr. Brixey urged maintenance managers to walk the
Packaging operators
can load film and
bags and provide
preventive maintenance
to reduce
downtime and boost
throughput.
Sosland Publishing Co.
Managed care for maintenance
It's as if the maintenance crew, which monitors the
health of equipment, has become the patient that needs
some intensive care to stabilize a bakery's operation.
While the current macro conditions of maintenance remain
incurable, bakeries can try several prescriptions to
mitigate the situations in their facilities.
Throughout his career in bakery operations, Jeremiah
Tilghman, now chief operations officer of Better Butter,
Salt Lake City, has found repeated success when combining
maintenance and sanitation under a single technical service
team to improve efficiency and operational effectiveness.
" Both maintenance and sanitation have the same
downtime activities. The master sanitation schedule is
much like a preventive maintenance schedule, so we've
combined those two teams under one umbrella and
under one leadership, " said Mr. Tilghman, who previously
worked at Flowers Foods, Canyon Bakehouse and
Bimbo Bakeries USA. " I've done that three times at three
different locations, and now we do it at the butter plant,
and it seems to work really well. I would highly encourage
that. "
Under the system, he added, new hires first work
up the sanitation ladder before transitioning to maintenance.
That way, a junior maintenance technician is
88 Baking & Snack November 2023 / www.bakingbusiness.com
production floor and " trust but verify " all work that's
completed to ensure that it's done properly, and the line
is operating as expected. He also used a medical analogy
to hammer home the point.
" It's like assuming that your new diet and exercise program
is impacting your blood sugar or your blood pressure
in a positive way, " he said. " You eventually need to check
your insulin level or monitor your blood pressure to verify
that you're actually getting the benefits you expected. "
Far too often, Mr. Brixey added, maintenance supervisors
rely on daily or weekly reports filled with key
performance indicators and other data that are lagging
indicators of their departments' performance.
" Nothing will yield as much fruit as going out and
interacting with equipment and the person responsible
for that machine, " he noted. " If I find a problem before
it becomes part of next week's report, I get a chance to
correct it before it impacts the bottom line, whether it be
time saved or money or both. "
What the doctor ordered
Today's bakers should consider investments that not
only boost throughput but also reduce maintenance requirements.
To minimize changeover times, Mr. Brixey
suggested bread and bun plants might want to consider
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