Consumer Food Blog
Consumer Food Blog
How equipment health checks improve long-term production performance
Consumer Food Blog
How equipment health checks improve long-term production performance
A wafer line rarely fails without notice. It gets there over months, through a baking plate running a few degrees cool, a cutting blade worn past its useful edge, and a drive bearing that has been creeping warmer since spring. All of it was visible well before the line stopped. Equipment health checks are how a plant finds those signals while the fix is still cheap and can be scheduled.
The financial case is easier to make than it once was. Siemens reported in True Cost of Downtime 2024 that the world's 500 largest companies lose around $1.4 trillion a year to unplanned downtime, equal to 11% of their combined revenue, and that an hour of unplanned stoppage in a fast-moving consumer goods plant costs roughly $36,000. Deloitte frames it through capacity, putting the cost of
What a health check covers on a confectionery or snack line
A health check compares how a machine behaves now against how it behaved at commissioning. On a wafer line that means plate temperature uniformity across the oven, plate surface and cleaning condition, dosing accuracy at the cream spreader, blade edge at the cutter, and block height variation through the book. On a biscuit line it means die roller wear, knife alignment, band tension, and the weight spread coming off the moulder. In chocolate it means conche shaft vibration, pump seal condition, temper curve stability, and enrober curtain behaviour across the full belt width.
Machine specifications describe what equipment does when it is healthy. Bühler's RotaMold Max Smart rotary moulder holds biscuit sizing to a coefficient of variation of 1% or less at speeds up to 40 m/min, and Bühler's OptiBake inductive wafer oven regulates each baking plate individually while cutting energy use by up to 50% against gas-heated systems. Those numbers hold on day one. Holding them in month thirty is a maintenance question, and the gap between rated and actual performance is what equipment health checks are really measuring. at 5 to 20% of what a plant could produce.
Wear shows up in quality long before it shows up as a stoppage
Worn equipment drifts before it breaks, and in consumer foods that drift costs money in ways the maintenance log never captures. A die roller past its wear limit widens the weight spread, so operators lift the target to protect the declared weight and giveaway rises on every pack. A cool patch in a wafer oven produces sheets that will not take cream evenly, which surfaces later as ragged cuts and off-spec blocks. Sweeps and scrap climb without anyone able to point at a single failure.
Grupo Marilan, the largest biscuit producer in Brazil with more than 5,000 employees, set out to raise reliability and availability on its wafer lines and took on Bühler's Total Care package for proactive asset management and predictive maintenance. The company has since recorded a 20% reduction in production losses covering scraps, sweeps, and overfill, along with better line availability and improved plate cleaning. That came from catching drift early rather than from buying new equipment.
Condition and line flexibility are the same conversation
Regular equipment health checks become even more important for producers running eight or ten SKUs on the same line. A machine in good condition has a wide operating window, so a changeover lands inside specification quickly. A worn machine narrows that window, and the cost appears as slower changeovers and more scrap during ramp-up on the new format rather than as downtime.
That matters for anyone launching products. Bühler's ChoCoat Quick Change enrobing solution switches a line from dark to white chocolate in under 45 minutes because the product-wetted lower section is removed and replaced rather than cleaned. Equipment in known condition is also equipment you can trust when trialling a new recipe, which is why process trials at Bühler's research and training centers nd maintenance discipline on your plant floor reinforce each other.
What the numbers say about planning ahead
Without regular equipment health checks, reactive repairs often cost far more than the repair itself. Expedited parts, overtime, scrapped work in progress, and production delays all add to the final cost. ABB's Value of Reliability survey of 3,215 plant maintenance decision makers put unplanned outages at roughly $125,000 an hour for a typical industrial business, and found more than two thirds of them seeing outages at least monthly while 21% still run equipment to failure.
Discipline moves those figures. The Siemens data shows the average large plant now recording 25 downtime incidents a month against 42 in 2019, and losing 27 hours a month rather than 39. McKinsey's operations research finds that condition-based maintenance typically cuts machine downtime by 30 to 50% and extends machine life by 20 to 40%.
Making it routine
Start with the most critical equipment. Equipment health checks should happen most often on machines that would stop the whole line, while equipment with backup can usually be checked less often. A written checklist helps every technician inspect the same items in the same way, and keeping records over time makes it easier to spot small changes. For example, a bearing that runs a little warmer with each equipment health check can be replaced during planned maintenance instead of causing an unexpected breakdown months later.
What makes equipment health checks worth the visit is the process knowledge behind reading the result: knowing whether a vibration signature on a conche shaft warrants attention today or at the next planned stop.
Inspect on a schedule, act on what the check finds, and log the result. Measured against $36,000 an hour, a programme that prevents a single unplanned shift a year has already paid for itself several times over, and we are glad to help build one around your line.
How can we help?
buhler.minneapolis@buhlergroup.com
+1 763 847 9900
Bühler
13105 12th Avenue North
Plymouth, MN
USA
