ORLANDO, FLA. — The lack of skilled maintenance workers in the baking industry has required baking companies to level up the way they approach both maintenance programs and recruiting and retaining their maintenance employees. Luis Vargas, vice president of engineering, and Carlos Quiroz, senior reliability manager, both of Bimbo Bakeries USA, Horsham, Pa., spoke about strategies that can help baking companies address the issues of equipment reliability at the American Society of Baking’s BakingTech conference, held Feb. 16-18 in Orlando. 

As skilled maintenance workers retire, the baking industry has struggled to recruit and retain maintenance mechanics and technicians to fill that knowledge gap.

“It has been hard for our workforce to stay on top of business and maintain our assets,” Vargas explained, which can have lasting impacts on productivity and efficiency. 

“If you don’t manage your assets, your assets will manage you,” Quiroz added.

Quiroz urged the baking industry to move away from a reactive maintenance strategy to a prescriptive strategy, which he defined as one that uses machine learning to adjust operating conditions for desired outcomes as well as intelligently schedule and plan asset maintenance. 

A prescriptive maintenance strategy requires three steps. The first is schedule major and minor overhauls to replace wear components such as relays, wear strips, pneumatic cylinders and more. He stressed the importance of detailed job plans for maintenance tasks so that even the lowest skilled worker can execute them successfully. 

The second step is condition monitoring for keeping track of critical machine parameters and large high-cost components. Condition monitoring can be online or route-based, and some parameters that could be telling are vibration, temperature, pressures and amperage. This monitoring allows teams to check critical assets between scheduled overhauls. 

The third action bakers should take in prescriptive maintenance is to use contextualized data from a CMMS (computer maintenance management system) to predict a problem or failure and diagnose or prescribe a possible solution. 

“This is a bit trickier because it’s a statistical analysis, and it’s going to depend on the cleanliness of your data,” Quiroz said. “Think of the CMMS as the medical record for the asset. Anything that is done on the asset in the form of preventative maintenance, corrective maintenance, replacements and adjustments should go in the database, but often the CMMS is a repository that never gives us anything, and we have to change that.”

Business intelligence systems and software can help bakers create interactive dashboards with this data and help bakers monitor the bakeries and specific lines. Bakers can see failures and how long it takes to repair and start asking more informed questions about asset care and taking action. 

In addition to implementing a prescriptive maintenance strategy, Vargas shared strategies for recruiting and retaining skilled maintenance workers. He encouraged bakers to evaluate if their current wages for entry-level and skilled maintenance mechanics and technicians are competitive with other companies and industries. He also spoke about the benefits of skills-based compensation. By growing compensation based on skills acquired, bakers can increase retention and decrease turnover.

“You have to understand first the skills of your mechanics and what skills do you want them to grow in order to perform this job successfully,” he explained. “The next step when you recruit new mechanics is to identify what skills you expect them to have.”

Vargas also noted that apprenticeship programs are an effective way to enroll associates and develop them into the mechanics a bakery needs. Apprenticeship programs require procedures and defined skills so that those enrolled can see a clear path to a successful career. 

No effective maintenance program is complete without a conversation about spare parts. Vargas stressed the need for a disciplined approach to spare parts inventory for effective asset management. He gave bakers some guidance on how to critically evaluate their inventories by questioning the cost of their inventory, turnover of parts and the definition of what a critical part is. Maintenance departments should not have spare parts gathering dust on the shelf and should evaluate whether they have obsolete or duplicate parts. Knowing what parts are stored and where they are is critical. 

“Excellence starts with order and discipline,” he said.