Perth County Ingredients is a supplier of dried egg products to food, beverage and sports nutrition markets in Canada and worldwide.
- Maintenance was too reactive
- High volume of after-hours maintenance calls
- 54% drop in reactive maintenance
- 47% reduction in after-hours maintenance calls
- $40,000 decrease in maintenance costs
Challenge
Fighting fires all day, every day
Tom Dufton joined PCI’s dried egg processing facility as a contractor back in 2012, so he already had in-depth knowledge of the plant when he took on his current role as Maintenance / Project Manager in 2017.
“When I started [full time], there was a large need for us to upgrade our facility. We needed new boilers, new chillers, that sort of thing,” says Tom. What’s more, the maintenance team was wasting time and resources. 100% of the maintenance work was reactive. The team couldn’t move beyond trying to put out fires all day. His team also had little insight into after-hours emergency calls. The maintenance team would get alerted and someone would have to respond – even if it was just to press a reset button or address a routine problem.
Tom knew his facility was in desperate need of a solution that would allow them to be more proactive.
Solution
Using Fiix to tackle reactive maintenance and save time
The facility’s BAS system was already in place, but Tom knew more was needed to get things under control. He needed solid CMMS software and made the choice to use Fiix, by Rockwell Automation. It didn’t take much to get started.
“It was quite simple,” says Tom about putting Fiix in place at his facility. “The minute you start adding assets, you start making work orders, you start making scheduled maintenance, and your team can look to the software for day-to-day instruction.”
Tom knew that the Fiix solution needed to be accessible from a mobile device. He started by providing tablets with the Fiix app to the entire maintenance team. The app allowed the team to log and look up work by scanning a QR code on an asset. It also gave them the power to access standard operating procedures (SOPs), old work orders, and the BAS in seconds. All of this helped to shave hours off the time it took to troubleshoot a problem, especially when it came to managing contractors.
“We put Wi-Fi throughout the entire plant, which has allowed us to use tablets and cell phones to access Fiix,” says Tom.
And when you have all that scheduled maintenance in the system with pictures and asset tags, you can set up contractors with that information and your team doesn’t need to be disrupted.
Automating maintenance across the whole company
The VP of operations at PCI noticed the success at Tom’s facility and asked Tom to implement Fiix at seven other L.H. Gray facilities across the country.
“The automation within our facility has basically allowed us to run multiple operations from one location,” says Tom about the benefits of this project. “The production manager and I get emails, so our fingers are always on the pulse of the facility. Even without being there physically, you still know what’s happening.”
“Putting in these measures for automation has allowed us to bring down the number of people who need to be in one place at one time,” says Tom.
What’s more, the control that Fiix gives Tom has allowed him to roll out the remaining implementations remotely, with no plans of slowing down anytime soon.
Result
The search for maximum maintenance efficiency
Tom’s strategy was working. Reactive maintenance was down 54% and after-hours call-ins were down 47%. But there was still plenty of room for improvement.
Preventive maintenance was still being scheduled based on old habits. A compressor would be checked every few weeks, even if it was operating perfectly. Oil changes relied on whether technicians thought the oil was good or bad. And inspections were still being done manually. The team was spending hours checking meter readings and logging data every week.
And while asset failure and firefighting were down, Tom knew tasks like these were costing his team time and money they could be using somewhere else. So he set out to cut them from the schedule.
There was just one problem—Tom didn’t have the information he needed to pinpoint those jobs or the tools to automate them. So he teamed up with Fiix’s integration partner Majik Systems to find a solution.
Saving $40,000 a year with condition-based maintenance
With the help of Fiix and Majik, Tom connected the facility’s PLCs to his CMMS. This gives him the power to collect real-time information about the condition of equipment. Now he can track vibration, temperature, or any other machine reading.
But this data would be next-to-useless without the link between Majik and Fiix. This connection allows asset data to flow into Tom’s CMMS without him lifting a finger. If a reading hits a certain threshold, a work order is created.
The best part is the integration was done remotely. And it took only two weeks from start to finish (with less than a day’s work for Tom and his team).
“We now have alarms that are tripped and warnings to operators that if action is not taken or maintenance isn’t contacted that it could shut them down,” says Tom. “The plant runs 24/7, but maintenance is only here Monday to Friday. So it’s very important that we’re capturing all this information… because when we see a change in the condition of an asset, we need to take action.”
The results have been immediate and significant. It’s been nine months since Tom put Majik in place and has already cut costs by $40,000 from decreasing breakdowns and shedding unnecessary jobs from his team’s to-do list. This is a 300% return on his original investment in the project.
We’ve seen old issues fall off. Things like motor pumps and bearings replacements. They’ve all decreased. And the value of connecting Fiix and Majik will only increase as Tom continues to find ways to optimize his maintenance schedule and help his company make smarter CapEx decisions.
Supplementing condition-based maintenance with predictive maintenance
Condition-based maintenance was a huge step forward for PCI. But Tom knew that the next leap for the maintenance team was to start taking more predictive measures. He wanted to get to a place where failures could be predicted before they were even close to occurring – Fiix’s Asset Risk Predictor was the answer.
Because the team was already tracking things like pump current and torque, thanks to their Majik integrations, feeding that data into Asset Risk Predictor just made sense.
The data being collected and pushed through Asset Risk Predictor lets them do a deeper dive into those alerts than a CMMS could allow. Now, things like premature pump failure or excessive seal wear can be avoided, production can remain smooth, and they can make educated decisions based on all the data flowing into their system.
“We’ve had great success so far,” says Tom. On the question of failures, he joked that, “Unfortunately, we haven’t had a failure yet, but we have seen some of that data trend upwards to a yellow alert.”
Published May 22, 2022
