Food & Beverage company partners with MAVERICK Technologies to investigate production inefficiencies, recommend process improvement changes, and perform technical design and system implementation to increase production efficiency.
Objective
A significant portion of a major Food & Beverage (F&B) facility had automated system capabilities that required manual assistance due to an outdated and poorly designed architecture, causing major reliability issues. These issues, along with a skillset shortage, resulted in improper operations, which caused high equipment turnover and significant budgetary issues. The company found improving and overhauling system architecture to be extremely difficult, prompting their search for a partner to assist them in this undertaking. The customer engaged MAVERICK Technologies as their trusted partner to help them reduce operational inefficiencies and improve overall facility production processes.
Results
MAVERICK field technicians worked closely with the customer’s maintenance staff and contractors to understand the state of their facility and investigate the causes of their operational inefficiencies to alleviate these issues and improve the customer’s processes. MAVERICK’s expert resources and technical consulting knowledge helped the customer improve operating margins and fixed asset utilization, ensuring an overall decrease in the customer’s cost of goods (COGs) sold. Per customer requirements, the MAVERICK team also smoothly transitioned operations back to facility staff once the project was completed.
Solution
- Engaged with the customer to learn about the facility, products, manufacturing process and maintenance process.
- Identified inefficiencies, from lack of process automation to frequent unplanned downtime.
- Discussed recommendations with maintenance staff to alleviate production inefficiencies, from specific component solutions to overall maintenance strategy improvements.
- Brought maintenance staff up to speed on electrical and instrumentation best practices and helped cultivate a safety-centric culture throughout all improvement projects.
- Ensured all automated processes were in operation and major efficiency issues had been eliminated for all project work.
- Worked on improvement projects, such as:
- Added program temperature limits and a new metering valve housing, improving the least-efficient fryer product line.
- Set a water pressure float switch to eliminate blockages in ingredient washing and pump transport stations facility wide.
- Improved system reliability of water wheel lines for ingredient washing by adding a water-resistant transmitter, saving $6k/month per line in replacement parts alone.
