The food and beverage industry operates under strict regulations to ensure the production, distribution, and consumption of safe products. It is crucial for food and beverage producers to take on the responsibility of providing safe products and employing reliable mobile maintenance solutions to prevent potential health risks. Given the rising number of hospitalizations and fatalities caused by food poisoning, it becomes the duty of producers in this industry to guarantee the highest level of safety and compliance in their production and delivery processes, including the adoption of effective mobile maintenance solutions for timely repairs and upkeep of equipment.
Food and beverage producers must cultivate effective preventive maintenance strategies in order to accomplish this goal. By guaranteeing that equipment and facilities remain in satisfactory condition without any major malfunctions, companies can avert food safety concerns and adhere to mandatory regulations. This blog throws light on the need for statutory regulations in the food and beverage industry, challenges in ensuring good preventive maintenance practices, and the role of mobility in fostering a good preventive maintenance strategy.
Overview:
The Need for Statutory Regulations in Food Industry
Government bodies, including the FDA and USDA, impose rigorous regulations on the food and beverage industry. While they do not prescribe specific operational procedures, these regulatory agencies emphasize the need for companies to ensure food safety and prevent contamination. Non-compliance can lead to legal consequences, fines, and facility shutdowns.
Given the circumstances, it is crucial to prioritize the development of effective preventive maintenance strategies and ensure they are not neglected or delayed in any manner.
Challenges in Fostering an Effective Preventive Maintenance Strategy
Developing an effective preventive maintenance strategy for an organization is a challenging endeavor that involves numerous intricate processes. Moreover, if your organization is still relying on manual processes with little or zero automation, you need to brace up with a couple of challenges that hampers your preventive maintenance strategy.
Preventive maintenance basically involves maintenance and servicing of the equipment at a regular pace such as cleaning, lubrication, part replacement or occasional repairs. This way, you tend to minimize the scope of equipment breakdowns and defects that would otherwise hamper the safety of food and beverages.
Though this process looks simple, unfortunately most of the companies are still relying on paper-based work orders as part of their preventive maintenance program. This proves a major hinderance in the wake of severe labor shortages and impending safety regulations. Paper-based processes cause a lot of problems and are ineffective when dealing with high production environments. Moreover, with limited availability of staff, the sustenance of regular preventive maintenance tasks becomes a herculean task, particularly in an environment where there are several specialized machines. With increasing backlogs, equipment breakdowns become a regular affair.
Typical Avoidable Scenarios
Massive production disruptions result in significant resource allocation and hinder compliance with food safety regulations. Avoidable situations encompass the following instances:
Breaking off Metallic and Plastic Objects
Food can become contaminated and cause poisoning when metallic and plastic objects detach from the equipment and fall into it. Such incidents result in a violation of food safety regulations due to non-compliance.
Leakage of food from Pump Gaskets
Improper installation of pump gaskets, either due to incorrect sizing or age-related deterioration, increases the risk of food leakage from the shaft. If left unchecked, this could result in significant contamination.
By implementing a strong preventive maintenance program, situations like these can be avoided, preventing any potential food safety concerns. Yet, when faced with a lack of adequate resources, it becomes challenging to effectively tackle these routine incidents.
Adopt the Right Mobile Solution
It’s time for organizations to empower their personnel with mobile maintenance solutions to proactively and efficiently execute preventive maintenance tasks. For instance, technicians and maintenance personnel waste a lot of time manually searching for right parts for equipment maintenance or looking for instruction manuals for repair. In such a scenario, they had to leave the production facility, enter an office to manually print from the Oracle Plant Maintenance module, which would be quite cumbersome and time-consuming.
What if these technicians were provided with a mobile maintenance solution that syncs with the Oracle Maintenance Cloud to fetch the required data without leaving their production facilities? Awesome, isn’t it? That’s what Propel Apps’ mobile enterprise asset management (EAM) solution aims to fulfill. Propel Apps’ EAM solution helps production personnel to easily scan assets, track workorders, access instruction manuals or even post data to Oracle – anywhere, anytime. And the best part is this app even works when you are in poor internet connectivity areas or completely offline.
Conclusion
There is a saying, “prevention is better than cure.” And this aptly applies to equipment maintenance as well. It is always better to prevent issues before they actually occur to mitigate any impending problems. Moreover, in a regulated industry like Food and Beverages, one needs to be quite cautious, and hence the need for effective preventive maintenance program assumes significance.
With the right mobile solution like the Propel Apps’ mobile EAM, maintenance personnel can extend the lifecycle of their equipment to reduce food safety risks. Apart from that, technicians are always armed with the up-to date data from Oracle that is very much needed for meeting regulatory compliances. To know more about Propel Apps’ EAM solution and its core features, talk to us today.
