Meat + Poultry - May 2008 - 84

MAINTENANCE TIPS

consist of vague line item descriptions such as, "grease bearings." What
bearings? How many bearings? What
kind of grease? How much grease? Or,
"check belt tension." What should the
belt tension be? How is it measured?
What is to be done if it is too tight or
too loose?
The point is that the best PM programs have the detail printed on the
PM work orders. These work orders
will also tell the mechanic what safety
equipment and tools are required, as
well as an estimate of how long the
PM should take.
So what happens when, for instance,
a bad bearing is discovered during the
PM? If the PM work order says to grease
a bearing but the bearing is bad and
needs to be replaced, is this part of
the PM or is this now a repair? Again,
the world-class maintenance organizations will step out of the PM work or-

der and create a corrective work order
for the repair. This allows for a true
picture of what is actually occurring
with the equipment. When the repair
cost is lumped into the PM cost, it blurs
the true cost of ownership. An organization's preventive maintenance costs
become inflated and the repair costs
are understated.
It also makes it difficult to get to
the next step: predictive maintenance.
Creating the corrective work order
for the repair makes it much easier
to determine how often particular
parts are failing and allows the worldclass maintenance organizations to
predict failure and add changing of
parts at regular intervals before failure occurs. Then if failure begins to
occur between those intervals, this
becomes a red fl ag signaling something more severe is wrong with the
equipment.

Less Waste. Less Space.
Better Performance.

!
lam

With our new absorbent polymer tray pads,
you really can get more with less.
International Tray Pads absorb & retain 35%-50% more moisture under a load
than traditional all paper/pulp pads. This highly desirable property makes
them well suited for fresh meat, poultry or other case ready packages. Using
FDA approved super absorbent polymers our products are 30% lighter and
case sizes are 40% smaller. This means a lower environmental footprint in
producing, handling and disposing of the product.

International Tray Pads & Packaging, Inc.
P.O. Box 307 | 3299 NC 5 Hwy | Aberdeen, North Carolina 28315
Tel: (910) 944-1800 | Fax: (910) 944-7356 | www.traypads.com

MEAT&POULTRY

May 2008

www.MEATPOULTRY.com

Next is the equipment performance
issue. Accuracy is a measurement
of maintenance effectiveness in the
equipment in fi rst processing operations, like stunning, killing, picking,
venting and eviscerating, etc. Maintenance is often charged with making
adjustments on this equipment based
on different flock sizes.
The maintenance department's effectiveness is now measured as equipment efficiency and/or a yield rating
for the department. Several areas of
concern here are where does the data
get measured and how do the results
flow backward in the process? For example, an improperly adjusted stunner
may cause broken pulley bones, which
don't get discovered until deboning
operations two to six hours after the
birds have left first processing. There
must be a process of reporting information backward in the process (or
better yet, there should be checks
done before leaving fi rst processing)
in order to make adjustments to improve the operation. The same holds
true for various measurements like
broken wings, bloody wings, overscald, torn skin, feathers, etc. This is
where consistent application of a root
cause analysis, or the FMEA process,
will begin to remove the variation in
the process being analyzed.

Foundation for success
Well-run maintenance organizations,
just like their production counterparts,
consist of procedures and process.
These procedures and processes provide the foundation for successful operations on the plant floor and provide
management the tools to continuously
improve their operations. Future articles will explore how to track downtime and how drive to the root cause
of maintenance issues.
Mark Eystad is the president of Mark 1045, Inc.,
Marietta, Ga. He has implemented continuous improvement processes in meat and poultry processing operations in more than 30 facilities in the U.S.
and Puerto Rico.
We would like to hear from you - to comment on
this story or to request reprints, contact us by
e-mail at: meatpoultry@sosland.com.

http://www.traypads.com http://www.MEATPOULTRY.com

Meat + Poultry - May 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meat + Poultry - May 2008