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AEO helps Young's build maintenance strategy

A SKF UK product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 27, 2009

An asset efficiency optimisation (AEO) service from SKF is helping Young's Seafood to develop an effective long-term maintenance strategy.

In particular, the AEO techniques being employed by Young's Seafood are providing a framework within which business and production managers can build and test maintenance and operational processes, with the goal of increasing productivity, reducing downtime and cutting ongoing costs.

Kevin Hamilton, engineering manager at Young's in Grimsby, said: 'Efficiency, speed of production and delivery, with the highest levels of quality, are among the critical factors that drive our business, ensuring that we provide the best products and services to our customers.

'We recognised that to ensure we consistently achieved the highest standards we needed to use a process of continuous assessment of all our manufacturing, management and associated business processes.

'As a result, we have been working closely with SKF and its local authorised distributor, BRT Bearings, to develop an effective maintenance strategy that is integrated into our business processes at three of our production plants in and around Grimsby.' For Young's, the process began with a client needs analysis (CNA), which was then benchmarked against standardised data sets that have been gathered and analysed from across the food and beverage industry.

After agreeing a structure, SKF completed a thorough assessment of current practices at the three manufacturing plants, assessing processes from plant maintenance to operational structures and levels of efficiency.

SKF's AEO team interviewed a wide cross-section of Young's operations and management teams, conducting both group and one-to-one sessions.

Of the CNA, Hamilton said: 'This was carried out in partnership with SKF and BRT Bearings, with their experts working closely with our production and maintenance staff over a period of weeks to investigate key areas of operations.

'The final report then identified the strengths and potential weaknesses of our existing procedures.

'More than 40 key performance indicators, including monitoring, downtime, reactivity, operational risk assessment and failure analysis were used, and each was then benchmarked against SKF's database of food and beverage sector statistics to show possible problems and areas of excellence.' The next stage, which is ongoing, is the development, roll-out and implementation of a detailed maintenance strategy review, utilising failure modes effects and criticality analysis.

SKF, BRT Bearings and Young's are conducting joint workshops and training sessions to ensure this knowledge can be re-used across the manufacturing facility at Grimsby.

The new maintenance strategy will help develop and introduce new maintenance techniques and technologies as part of a three-year maintenance improvement programme.

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