Managing Critical Production Environments: Promoting Uptime and Mitigating Risks in the Food and Beverage Industry
As maintenance and operations specialists, our goal is to safely produce quality food and beverage products, all while optimizing our team and keeping our customers happy. This requires a comprehensive approach, which lends itself to consistent processes and protocols. There are risks all around us — people, assets, poor processes, and more. All which can lead to inefficiencies: Increased costs leading to profit-killing downtime, failing compliance audits, and safety issues affecting our team-members.
Learn how you can use Asset Essentials™, our world-class CMMS, to help identify these risks and model improved processes to keep your team safe, promote asset uptime, control costs, and drive profitability.
Key Learnings:
- What are the risks related to maintenance operations in the food and beverage industry and why should you worry?
- What best practices and methodologies can you use to promote a safer, efficient, and lean environment?
- How can a well-implemented EAM/CMMS control costs and promote better profitability?
- How are modern “Industry 4.0” technologies such as sensors, AI, and others driving superior operations for the food and beverage industry?
Regina Costantino
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our webinar. Managing critical production environments, promoting uptime and mitigate risks in the food and beverage industry presented by brightly. Before we get started, I like to go over some housekeeping items for minds will be muted during the session and you'll also be able to submit questions for Q&A feature at the bottom right of your screen at any time.
If you don't see the ask a question box, if you open up the question mark icon at the bottom of the screen, that will open up for you and will be able to answer your questions at the end of the presentation. We also have some great content related available in the upper right box for feel free to look at that.
This presentation is being recorded and will be available on demand after the webinar. You'll be notified via email once it's ready. I now like to introduce our speaker today. Paula Chance is a senior manufacturing technology advisor at Brightly. He wrote his first series System in 2004 and since then has spent his professional career designing and directing serums and systems.
Paul will lead us today as we take a deeper dive into asset management in the food and beverage industry and how it is a critical component of helping the operation run as smoothly as possible. I'll now pass over to Paul to kick off the webinar. Thank you.
Paul Lachance
Awesome. Thank you, Regina, and thanks everybody for joining the webinar today. Coming up, we'll be discussing the topics of maintenance and operations risks with specific information about the food and beverage industry. How will a well implemented AM schema mess? And yes, will explain what those are. How can it control costs and ultimately promote better profitability? We'll do a history lesson and learn more about the concept of industry.
Four Point out technologies, sensors, artificial intelligence, and how can they help drive superior operations. We'll cover some best practices and methodologies to help promote safer, efficient, more lean operating environments. And of course, we always like to tie it back to what do investments in these technologies, how do they pay off? What is that return on investment? So let's start with some of the challenges that we all face.
So there is risks on our shop floors for all manufacturers or industrial organizations broken out into the following buckets financial production oriented risks, which I think the chief risk is unplanned downtime. Unplanned downtime is disruptive to your operations. It is disruptive to getting your products out the door. It is hurtful on morale of your staff, and we really need to work hard to try to mitigate and have more uptime, inadequate information.
So the data that is available throughout our operations, including data that can come from your shop floor, from your plant for reliable quality data, inappropriate quantity to help drive informed decision making. Without that, you are at risk for your operations, for your team challenging labor environments. We all see help wanted signs trying to find not only anybody who can come and work with people with the right skill set.
Safety always that can serve and the ability for our teams also operate efficiently. Processes or processes are always a risk and poor processes need to be addressed even without technology will cover that in this presentation today and ultimately tie that back to how schema maps can assist. And poor communication is a major risk. And we're not just talking about people talking with one another, but the ability for your systems to deliver appropriate information when you need to address maintenance.
If you're not doing that, you're at risk that we all know the food and beverage industry has very specific risks. Allergen Cross-contamination is microbiological contamination, foreign object temperature, packaging, integrity issues, cleaning chemical residues. I think the food and beverage industry is at a whole different level. That operation risks especially related to maintenance operations. If you're not paying attention, this can really contribute to potential cost overruns and ultimately hurt profitability.
Safety and even compliance. There are major macro challenges that we see in our world right now. So in the upper left hand corner here, 2022 last year, I called it a high score year inflation highest since 1981. We all felt it's 2023, it's come down quite a bit. But there's been other impacts on that. Demand is lower business client is not, climate is not as solid.
So we can't control inflation. Supply chain, we all went through major changes in supply chain. The pandemic was an obvious one, but there's a lot of others in the upper right hand corner. If you look at the McKinsey chart on the on the left side of the McKinsey chart here, from low to high is the types of impacts on the supply chain.
If you look in this upper right hand corner, at the highest end of the impacts to the supply chain, what we're living through a global military conflict as we speak, we are still feeling the residual impacts of COVID 19. This is right up here with supervolcano and meteor strike in terms of impact energy prices, highest they were last year and since 1980, they've come down, but they're still relatively high.
And then the big one is the labor market. We called it the great resignation during the pandemic. I spend recalling the great reshuffle there is baby boomers retiring at record clips. The labor shortage or shortage is only second only to wholesale and retail trade in the manufacturing industry and even worse in the manufacturing industry. Not only is it hard to find people to work, it's that skills gap where we're competing.
There's been a lot of recent legislation in this country that's promoting more US manufacturing and industrial type jobs, which is a wonderful thing in the United States, but it's creating even more competition. The point of this slide is you cannot control these challenges. You need to do what you can in terms of working around those compliance gaps is another one.
I've got some sort of clickbait type headlines here. These are all mostly older headlines, but nobody wants to make the news in the food and beverage industry. And if if you look back into each one of the most major compliance gap issues that make headlines, ultimately it comes back to work processes or control or maintenance operations and related.
And these things are avoidable. So we're going to cover this in terms of how you can use technology to help mitigate potential compliance gap impact. As we go through the presentation, I'm going to pause once in a while to throw up some trivia questions. I come from the great state of Maine, so they're all Maine based trivia. I know not a lot of people have been to Maine, so this might be completely new to you.
99% of the of this fruit grown in the United States comes from the state of Maine. So if you look on your screen, you'll have a place to type in your answer. If you could just take a couple of moments to think, what 99% of this fruit in the entire United States comes from Maine. So what you want to take a guess at what that is?
Type it in. Just going to pause here for a few seconds while while we give you a chance to type that in. I'm going to move on and give you the answer. Blueberries, Unfortunately, I can't see specifically who might have got this correct answer. We'll see this after the webinar. But if you guess blueberries and these are the low blueberry, robust bush blueberries that are often raked or hand-picked and they are fantastic Maine blueberries.
Kudos to you who got this one right. Okay. Moving back in to the webinar, what is Lean Operations? Lean simply means doing more with less. You can't keep up with inflation or other general increased cost cost. You don't have enough people. This is an incredibly tough labor market, the toughest I have ever seen. Being around this industry for decades.
Hiring retirements, skills gap, the Great Reshuffle. You have to work around this demand for maintenance or general operations doesn't slow down. Even despite these challenges, having a continuous improvement mindset, which is a combination of best practices, culture, utilizing technology and more how to work around these challenges. And lean does not mean quality or timeliness sacrifice. Just because you don't have enough people or the costs are rising, you just can't sacrifice, especially in the food and beverage industry.
You have to find other ways, better ways to keep up. Now, it isn't always challenging times. Sometimes business climate is skyrocketing, demand is off the charts for your product. You have a different type of challenges. Having a Lean operations mindset will help you in good times and back. And in general, Lean is working smarter, not harder, doing more with less.
And today's webinar is going to show you a number of ways how we can cover that. I always like to talk and give kudos to what maintenance and operations teams do. When I first got started in this industry and I'm sure there are people on this webinar today and here for maybe several decades like myself, the legacy perspective was maintenance people.
You only call them when something was broken. Call maintenance, get them up here. They were there just to fix broken assets. Unfortunately, they were an underfunded cost center, often in their own separate department off on their own, and the most egregious, they were underappreciated. Today, things are different. Today, if you need to get more out of your organization, we can do that through superior maintenance operations, Modern technology.
It's an exciting field. It's a growing field. We increase organization and production production capacity. A simple example say business is really good and you have to increase production to keep up with demand. Maybe you're faced with a decision, Do we run another shift? Or maybe we have to add a whole nother production line, or maybe you move from an 87% uptime to a 93% uptime and you can get the same thing a heck of a lot less expensive.
That's what these technologies and best practices can do for you. They are integrated with many departments, safety, quality, finance. They are just as critical to organization and success and growth as any other department, any organization. So what is ECM and CMA mess and how can it help? Technology people love acronyms. IAMS stands for Enterprise Asset Management, and I'm going to go to Seamless first, which is computerized maintenance management systems, because today they really are kind of grouped into the same thing.
There's a lot of you see a lot of articles where you'll see ECM and then CMA Mass today they really are blended into the same thing. And it really boils down to a summary of major components, including asset equipment and facilities management, preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, prescriptive maintenance, which will we're going to break those out in a little bit.
Work work orders is at the heart of Symphony AM because that's where a lot of the data ends up, not to mention managing your people spare parts inventory control, including ordering the procurement of those parts safety and compliance, reporting, analytics, key performance indicators and more. E.M. is really the same thing. You might add things like your Internet of Things in other aspects, but those are the core components and you see them a mess.
It's not only on your browser, on your desktop, it's on your mobile devices, it's cloud based. It is available anywhere, any time you need access to. There's an important concept called the PDF curve. So the PDF curve and this looks like an eye chart, but it's pretty easy when I explain it. When you get an asset and I'm make changes color here so we can see it a little better.
When you get an asset and you install that asset, that asset is running, it's the best that assets ever going to perform. It's running, it's running, it's running. And it hits the key point. The peak point is the point at which failure of that asset can start to be detected. Now, you're not going to be able to see it.
You're not going to be able to see it. You're not going to be able to hear it. But over time, if that asset, especially if you ignore it, will continue to degrade until you hit the F points in the p f curve. That F point is the functional failure. That's when that asset is no longer able to keep up with its intended design.
That's where quality starts to drop. That's where downtime starts to get more impactful, Things get a lot more expensive. And if you continue to ignore it, catastrophic failure, that's where your CapEx budgets skyrocket. Our goal as maintenance and operations professionals is to push up the curve. We are trying to catch those problems sooner than later and we do that through a variety of techniques.
But if you can catch the problems up here, it's way easier on your operations, it's way easier on your budget and your profitability will go up. And we do that through a variety of maintenance. I call it the maintenance spectrum run to fail. That is the worst of all situations. That's where you're just waiting for things to break and then you go fix them.
It is by far the most expensive, the most disruptive. And if that's where you're at today, that is okay. Being on this webinar, you're starting your journey to move along this to find better ways of addressing your maintenance, preventive maintenance is another great one. That's where you do things on a calendar every month, every week, every year, maybe every 10,000 cycle counts or 1000 hours of usage or whatever it may be.
But you're doing it more preventively than waiting for things to fail. That is a major step forward. And even if you're doing some PMS, you need to be doing as much preventive maintenance as you can because you will watch those corrective base work orders drop quite a bit. You're also really working towards condition based monitoring and this is where we start to get into that curve, where you start to get into this range up here, we are continuously monitoring those assets.
You're you're watching them with sensors or maybe there's already data coming off those assets, pressure, temperature, vibration is the filter clogged, whatever it may be. But it's telling you that that asset might not be working as good as it should. And you need to take a look that will ultimately lead to predictive maintenance. That's especially aided by the Internet of Things sensors.
We'll get into that in a little bit. Machine learning and I will also cover that. But that's where you're really starting to take that data to predict a failure may be coming and really get ahead of it. Pushing further up that curve, the Holy Grail. And we're not really there yet, but what we're all working towards is prescriptive maintenance.
That's finding out a problem is going to happen off in the future, give you a remedy in advance and stopping that problem from ever happening in the first place. Again, that's the journey we're all working towards and learning about these technologies is how you can start to see how they can be implemented from a practical standpoint. So breaking out the components of CMA Mass and again, these are just this is just a super high level.
It all comes down to asset and facility management, a summary of all of your buildings, your players, your production lines, all of the assets and sub assets, all of that information that is within your operations that you will eventually be doing some form of maintenance on corrective predictive, predictive or other ones. That's a major component. There's tools to optimize your team.
Upper left hand corner here we have our dashboard, including lists of all the work orders that are open that might be in your name or maybe as a manager is in your team's names parts. You need to order key performance indicators showing you are you on target for some of your goals. Bottom left corner is a summary of your team.
How well are they utilized? Are they on the right work orders, the right jobs that they should be? Do they have too much work on their plate? Should you shift some work around and balance out your schedule bottom right videos and instructions that can be used to give? What is the PM routine to fix this piece of equipment or to maintain this piece of equipment or to run it through a safety check or a quality check to have good instructions and upper right.
It's not just your desktop. This needs to be in your hands wherever you go, throughout your facilities, throughout your plants. And even if you're on the road, you have everything available real time with how your team is operating. Spare parts is a key component. What parts do you need to order? Where are they stored? Do you order them from multiple locations?
Do you store them in multiple locations? What are the quantities on hand? I'm not using the mobile device upper right hand corner. I don't need to walk across the plant to find a part that I don't have in stock. If you need to order parts, order those parts. If you're low on parts, especially in these supply chain, challenge environments may need longer wait times.
Make sure that you have everything in order around your spare parts. You cannot control the supply chain directly, but you can have redundant sources of ordering directly in your CNS. You can change those lead times so that you have plenty of time. So you're not caught in a stock out, which is a terrible way to extend your downtime should you need that part when you need it.
Safety and compliance. And we'll get into some more safety a little bit later on. Sorry, compliance a little bit later. But have all of your safety programs, your safety data sheets, your lockout, tagout procedures, your JSA, even plant shutdowns, start ups, disaster preparedness, PPE, any teams all right at your fingertips, including when they need to be reviewed. Bottom left, you can have a list of all the certifications that your team needs to have.
Bottom right for an individual team mate, what are they certified on? When do they expire? You get warnings on this and in the upper right here, incidents, incidents are slips and falls. It's like OSHA, 300 related incidents. So within your see the mess because this all ties in your operations and management have all of this directly your fingertips not only to keep you functioning more safe and compliant with to show potential audits, internal or external, which will get in a little bit too a little bit later.
And then, of course, we need to take all of this data that to draw it in intelligent decision. So dashboards with key performance indicators, upper right, maybe you want to increase the ratio of preventive to corrective maintenance so you can set a goal and you can see real time. Are you in line with that goal? And if you're not well, that's an error.
You have to take a deeper dive. But whether it's reporting analytics, sources of downtime, all of that data that lives next semester is available in a variety of reports nano lyrics, charts, graphs to help you make smarter decisions. Okay. Next trivia question What is the name of this official snack or dessert? You know, and I have some cheat sheet answers for some of these, but I've heard I'll give you some cheat sheets if you want to try to guess at what they are.
But I've heard the phrase moon pies, marshmallows, wagon wheels would be pies. There may be some others that you want to guess that. But if you want to type in your answer in this walk here and again, you'll be able to see these later and see how many of you got it. All right. I have no way of doing that.
Well, I'm in the middle of the presentation. You want to take a moment there to type in what you think that official main dessert is a picture of it. And the answer is Warby Parker. You can get Wookie pies pretty much at every convenience store in country market, in every little town throughout the state of Maine and probably in most places in northern New England.
They're delicious. You can go look them up online and get a recipe. Another Maine trivia question. Back to our presentation industry 4.0 Drive superior operations. So let's start with a very brief history lesson. We are living in the fourth Industrial Revolution. There have been three before this, the first industrial revolution, which happened in 1784, was all about mechanization, steam weaving looms.
We no longer just used our muscles and piece of burden to do things. This was a major technology enhancement and created big improvements in how we created. Since industry 2.0 is second Industrial Revolution, which happened in the 1870s, about 100 years ago, 9200 years later, with mass production aided by electricity and the assembly line. You think Henry Ford's Model T production line is a good example?
That was more in the early 1900s. There were there were some things before that that changed everything. That was a major technology advancements, which really turbocharge manufacturing across all industries. The third industrial revolution, automation, I think robots, computers start coming into play electronics, and that was in the late 1960s when that started. Again, major technology changes, Industry 4.0 where we are today, it's everything we just talked about, but it's the interconnected nature.
It's the ability to use the data and connect everything. Our people, our buildings, our vehicles, our assets, our production lines, the Internet of Things is a key part of that technical. The fourth Industrial Revolution is a combination of technologies. You see them on the bottom of the screen and 3D printing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things. These are all these highly technical terms.
You're like, Oh, I don't understand any of this, but you're going to get to know more and more over time what these things can offer in our operations, including some examples. We'll go through some practical examples. So the Internet of Things, this concept where our buildings can show us, tell us our buildings, our facilities can show us and tell us when they're not feeling well.
We don't we can't be in our buildings. We can't be around our assets 24 seven. But sensors and smarter assets can deliver data to do that. 3D printing is another one operating corner that would be at a point in the in somewhat in the future, will you be able to print spare parts that you need to get at?
You'll no longer have to be at the mercy of the supply chain for several types of spare parts. Bottom right. That's the concept of digital twins. That's the data that can come from our real assets. And you can have a living, breathing digital version of that asset, living in a computer that you can see maintenance issues well in advance.
You can apply design changes and other what if scenarios to catch problems very early. That comes from the data and uses things like artificial intelligence to do this. There are other exciting technologies. The assisted reality, which is the upper left hand corner, that woman is listening to an expert in her ear while she sees on a little screen that's floating in front of her schematics instructions while she does work.
She may not have the skill sets, but somebody in her ear can talk to her augmented and virtual reality. And these things are in the future. But you got to start thinking about and you got to start learning about them. In the future, you'll be able to use these augmented reality goggles where instructions flow in front of your eyes.
Now, this will allow for hands free mobile. Again, we're not there yet. We are working in that direction. And one of the great things about brightly, especially as a Siemens company, is you're at the forefront of these technologies. So as they become more readily available and they become more normal everyday use, you will be informed of these types of technologies.
Don't feel like you have to understand all of this today. Moving to Industry 4.0 is a journey. There's this concept called the digital maturity model. And if we start in this bottom area down here, we start in this bottom area down here, computers, we all have computers and we all are connected because you wouldn't be on this webinar if you were.
But it's not just you connecting to the Internet and to your fellow workers. It's your equipment, it's your vehicle, where appropriate, it's your assets, it's everything that you need to get maintenance from theoretically should be connected, and that's the direction we need to start working. And we'll talk about practical examples how to do that. That will move to visibility.
Visibility is where once you're connected, you could start to see things and start to make real time data driven decisions that will lead to transparency. That's where you're not only seeing things, you're starting to see things that are historically very difficult to find well in advance. That's pushing up the PEF curve and catching problems much sooner. That leads to predictability, that whole concept of predictive maintenance where you're catching problems before they really start to be impactful, and the Holy Grail adaptability, that is the concept of prescriptive maintenance.
And that's where and this is, this is often the future. You may see corrections happen before they were even known to happen. That's the Holy Grail. We are not there again that brightly. SEAMANS relationship. You'll know about these as they come along. Fortunately, most people are still way down here and you have room to grow, but you've got to start that journey again.
Being on this webinar today and looking at these technologies is a big step in that journey. Artificial intelligence and machine learning. I have a slide on this because there's just a lot of press and it's not always the most flattering press. First off, what is artificial intelligence and machine learning? You hear these phrases all the time, machine learning, and there's a lot of definitions of it.
To me, it's just getting the data, the acquisition of data from wherever it's coming from. You look at your phone and it recognizes you and it opens up. That's just your phone using the camera, accepting digital pictures of you, comparing it against a library and saying, That's it's me, open up the phone. Same thing with talk to text.
And that is another example of machine learning. Our industrial manufacture ring environments. There is a tremendous amount of data that can be come off your plant floor and it's doing the same thing. That data, that acquisition of data is going to be key to driving artificial intelligence, Artificial intelligence, what we use it all the time. Anybody goes to Netflix, you see, how does it know what I want to watch?
It knows because it studies you and it knows what you've searched on. It's taking that data and it's thinking, I guess, like a human in suggesting things. Autonomous vehicles is another great example. Tremendous amounts of data. Digital twins, more industrial example is an excellent example of taking all of that machine, learning all of that data and using it to come up to decisions that you might not be able to see and then ultimately act on.
So A.I. yes, are some negative press on this, but we used in combination with the smart people on this webinar, it's a winning combination of a tool with human decision makers to really help you get ahead of those challenges. And with A.I. and robotics and industry 4.0, people always are worried about are we going to lose jobs? And yes, some jobs will change.
But for the most part, if you look at all industrial revolutions, any time the assembly line came in with a model T, a lot of people did have that. Some of those jobs were lost, but they would use different ways to quick examples. Bottom right hand corner ATMs. When ATMs, automatic teller machines, those machines, you get cash out.
We all I remember when I went to my bank one time when I was younger and have two tellers were gone, replaced with ATM machines, I was like, oh my gosh, where are the teller going to go? Well, as ATMs started to increase, a funny thing happened. Tellers actually increased as well. Humans increased. Why? When when they were freed up from mundane transactional work, they started to be able to do more value producing activities.
They were starting to help a customer service kitchen, other bank services, and they started to make more. They started to do more and more bank tellers were hired. We're going to see we're going to see a transformation of maintenance and operations people. Yes, it'll be somewhat different as you start to look at factories. Maybe there are going to be fewer people standing over the equipment waiting to fix them, and maybe they're going to be up looking at more sources of data indicating potential future problems, making sure we have the right parts ready to spring into action if a predictive work order is needed.
So, yes, jobs will change, but you have to be thinking about the future and how can your people work with these new technologies? Because ultimately it will create a better environment for your workers. And through that transition. Practical example Smart Assets by Breitling. So this is an iota and I don't really like that phrase Iot, but it's the concept of sensors.
Sensors throughout your facilities are being used that can broadcast data. You can just drop a sensor onto an asset. This is a magnetized sensor. You just plop it down, turn it on and it and that sensor is going to start broadcasting data into the smart assets platform. That data is going to be analyzed As that data finds there's potential problems, a vibration is out of whack.
It's going to generate a work order in asset essentials and ultimately show up directly in your technician hands, in your mobile device chimes, alerts and so forth. So that data, as it comes in, it monitors, it shows what the readings are coming off. That data you can see physically in your plant where the sensors are that are out of whack, you can set thresholds for upper and lower boundaries and other intelligence.
And ultimately, as those work orders, as those tolerances are out of whack, a work order is going to be generated. And again, it's going to show up in that mobile device with instructions and and safety procedures. We need to see it. I mean, you talk about like 24 seven, 365. So some practical examples of this. By the way, the sensors that are available, there is a wide variety of sensors, pressure, temperature, voltage, breitling's smart asset platform there I think are more than 1000 1200 types of sensors that can potentially deliver a wide variety of data to a wide variety of facilities, buildings, assets and so forth.
Some practical examples this sensor down here is just a simple temperature sensor. You just zip tie it inside an environment and it starts to monitor 24 seven 365. We've all had situations where commercial refrigeration has been off maybe in the middle of the night, maybe over a weekend, and you didn't catch it until some damage happened. These are not expensive sensors.
You put it in, you start having start generate data. It's going to cache issues before they happen and send those alerts. Another basic example is electrical usage monitor. So we think control panels, but there's a lot of uses, this little hot drop sensor, it's a wonderful tool. You can drop it on any inbound electrical source and. It will measure energy, draw spikes, drops, brownouts, whatever, whatever you've kind of programed it to to monitor.
So this can really help mitigate major safety issues, control panels and otherwise, but also can indicate challenges along production lines. You have fluctuations in energy draw. Not only is that potentially very expensive, it also indicates potential maintenance issues. Yeah, generate a work order. Somebody check that pushing up the curve. Another example is pumps. We showed this example before.
This is just a simple magnetized sensor that's measuring vibration cavitation in. You can't feel that vibration with your hands. I mean, veterans might say they can, but I mean, the subtle vibrations very, very early and then use readily available data to indicate, hey, these are the thresholds that we need to watch for and set up. You know, if we're out of tolerance, create a worker.
Again, these are practical, simple uses of Iot rightly smart assets, including these very affordable sensors that can be put in place even for older assets that have no ability to generate any data. So great practical use of industry 4.0 Technology Best practices complement Lean operations. There are a variety of best practices by this demo walks total predictive maintenance, Six Sigma Chi Z, There's a ton of them.
In general, the goal of these best practices methodologies to really assist you with Lean operations if you weren't having maintenance challenges, you really need to look at some of these best practices in combination with implementing these technologies and right lease implementation team can really help you with that. I'm just going to go through two simple examples today to kind of just give you a little teaser.
And I, I recommend any of you, if you're not familiar with these best practices, you can look them up and look up detailed articles and videos on all of these five S is a really good example, and I think those of you in the food that are in the food and beverage industry, this is sort of ingrained in your mindset, but I'm going to challenge you beyond traditional Just production finance is simply to move from this before to an after.
I mean, it's this common concept of sort of take away all the junk. You don't need that in order. Arrange it smartly shy, clean. You're not going to be able to figure out where you're having problems over here. You're not going to see a fluid leak or smell something that might be off in this. You will hear standardize, make this become this is the way we're going to run this and sustain it becomes a mindset.
Now, food and beverage, your regulatory compliance requires you have a lot of this by this mentality. But think beyond just the shop floor. Think about your tool parts, your tool crates, your spare part locations, and any other aspect of how you manage your operations, including shop floor with that five s mentality so that you can catch problems in a much easier fashion.
Doing more with less In Gemba walks another very simple best practice methodology. Gemba means it's Japanese for the real place or the place where value is created. A lot of these best practices in that the methodologies originated in the automobile manufacturer in Japan and have been adopted worldwide. And it's it's as simple as why it's taking a walk around your operations and spending time with the real place or the place where value is created.
That's what Gemba meets. It has a very formal process. You choose a theme, you prepare a plan, you make sure the team is aware that this is going to happen, not to get them on guard, but so they can participate in the process. And you just follow this standard process we're not doing Gemba walks to find fault or call out employees ever.
That's a morale buster. We're not trying to quickly implement changes on the spot. We're not trying to disregard employee input. We're trying to live where the operations happen. And it's a great way to discover where improvements that continuous improvement mindset can happen, including maintenance and operations improvements which will ultimately end up back in your sea mess. So again, these are two simple methodology examples.
High level teasers, but they are part of your journey towards more efficient operations compliance. This is a biggie. Again, we want to avoid making the news and we know these are rare exceptions, but there are all kinds of ways to think about compliance. First off, the food and beverage industry, maybe secondary to life sciences, is probably the most regulated industry.
ISO 9001, which is a very generic one rescuer, passive FSM, GMP, GFCI. And if you're in other parts of the world, you have other now acronyms at the heart of all of these quality customer and team safety. Solid operations are central themes. If you have problems with any of these, you use that sort of tip of the iceberg metaphor.
You are having much deeper problems. If you get challenges in your compliance, it ultimately it's the stuff down below the tip of the iceberg that you need to fix. And that's what this technology needs. Best practices can do. If you are able to keep up with good scores, with your regulatory compliance, both internal and external, you will both boost the morale of the team.
And conversely, if you have a challenge with an audit that can really kind of hurt morale, it will help you attract an in, more importantly, retain the best talent. And it's really it's just required. I mean, you need to show your customers and your prospects you are serious. There are are why there are returns. That's the benefits as well.
Avoiding costly violations, avoiding insurance, price hikes, avoiding term drains on your resources, and avoiding losing contracts or hurting business relationships due to the noncompliance. So we really need to be serious. As we know in this industry. Your e m your skimmer mess, right? These acid essentials can really help with this. I put in kind of three major buckets, but documentation training and tracking it briefly in documentation.
The documentation you have the ability to, uh, anything you're going to have your people do, you're going to anything your people do has to have good record keeping. You have to know all of your procedures. You have to know detailed step by step instructions, including possibly videos, having all your job assessments, your safety data sheets, hazards. They mean everything right at your fingertips, not only in your desktop browser, but in your mobile as well.
By well, training. Training is always at your fingertips. Video Support on how to perform a task. Having detailed step by step instructions reminding you when you need to look over all of your records or certifications or safety programs or compliance programs, identifying those training gaps and making sure you have the right trained people for the right jobs. And then tracking Asset Essentials, Brightlingsea mask logs, everything.
Any time anybody makes a change to a record, having a history of all the work orders by asset, by facility, by production line, seeing the root cause problems, digital signatures, your team signing off when they do work, and a smart system with automated it alerts and escalation appropriate workflow. A smart syllabus that can adhere to your policies. You do all of this, you an audit, internal or external, will go significantly better than you pull out a notebook or a spreadsheet or, God forbid, none of the above.
That's where you have challenges. Having these systems in place can really help you stay ahead and mitigate potential compliance gaps. Last trivia question What is the name of this Maine springtime traditional food? Yeah, If you've ever been to Maine in late April, May and early June, you can be driving in the countryside and you'll see a sign and a table on the side of the road.
Often, you know, pay on your own to pick up bags of these or or a little boxes of these on the side of the road. And they are absolutely delicious. And I'll give you a little hint. If you are a musician and you look at these, the shape of these I'm sorry, I should have put you on here so you can type it in.
You can just take a couple of seconds. You have any idea what that food is? You can please type it in. And I apologize if I'm moving us off this too quickly. But the answer is fiddle heads they have other names are basically a fern. And once they unroll into the finish fern, you can't eat it. Then when you catch a minion, when they're like this, you can just walk in the woods and pick these dates.
They are absolutely delicious and very nutritious. So that's another final main trivia question for you guys. Homestretch here, Return on investment. It's an investment into this technology and it will save you time and it will save you money and ultimate will deliver a a positive return on investment. So we talked about the concept of the curve down here as you push up this payoff curve.
Well, if you notice here, you're catching problems high on the curve. And this data comes from a tremendous amount of brightly customers. We did some analysis on this $1 a year, a work order. Sorry if you catch problems here, this is just an example. If you catch it late on the curve, you catch it down here. That catastrophic failure, pass the F in the curve, $5 per one quarter on average, 500% increase, a five fold increase as you push up this piece of curve.
And even if you can catch it more in this range, it's two times $2. The work order for this example, and it's not only your operational expense, it's your CapEx. If you catch things way down here, you triple your CapEx expenses. So catching things or not catching them and wait till they fail way down on this end of the spectrum.
Incredibly expensive 500% more. You want to push up the payoff curve. That's what this technology can do. And when you do the math, it really shows you another way to look at this. Downtime is expensive. On average, $260,000 per hour. Now, that's across all industries is a U.S. number, by the way. And that includes things like automobile manufacturers or they measure in the millions of dollars per hour.
But if we use a simple example down here, let's just say we have a production simple production line example down here. Our downtime is costing us per hour $10,000 every hour we're down that we are supposed to be producing and we can't. That hurts our business. And we're measuring it at 10,000 now. And if you can't measure it, that's another reason why you need to remember this historically, we've had 25 hours of downtime for this particular example.
This downtime is costing us a quarter million dollars a year. Implementing CMBS, right? These asset essential smart assets. T if you shave off 10%, that's going to save 25. It means going from 25 downtime hours to a 20 to 23.5. My math is terrible, but cutting off two and a half hours, that is easy. That's going to cover well, cover the cost to implement this technology.
And these are just rough, rough examples. You communicate with a brand representative for more specifics, more realistically, we cut your downtime in half. Did you save yourself 125 grand a year or even potentially? And that's possible. You get a predictive maintenance posture and catching things up here. You pay for this technology over and over again, not to mention the smooth operations the comply science, the safer environment.
Pushing up this curve, using this technology has absolutely solid return on investment. You just got to get started and find a partner, like rightly so, to close it out. You cannot control these all uncontrollable factors, macro environment or even specific to the food and beverage industry. But you can do the next best thing you can use. Seems as IAM to help lean, operate, create a lean operation environment to defend against these uncontrollable factors such as inflation hiring market, you will have a better, safer, improved quality and more efficient operating environment.
You will have a more smoothly running and a happier team. You will be a safer environment and have better compliance. You will have more assets in system uptime, including longer life. Of those assets. You will save money, you will hedge your budget and ultimately be a more profitable organization. And what I don't see on this slide, which is equally important, all this is you need a partner who help get this information to you, the software, the services to implement it and to keep you informed it brightly.
With Siemens, as our parent is at the forefront of this technology, but they work with every day food and beverage manufacturing organization that may not understand this technology very well. That's what the role is simple, easy to use implementation strategies with the right technology will get you these better outcomes. So that brings us to the conclusion of the formal webinar.
I see we have looks like about nine or 10 minutes or so for any questions that may have come up. So I'll go ahead and end. If you if you have questions, please put them in that Q&A area and we'll see if we can get to them. In the meantime, I'll just check with Regina to see if we have any any questions.
Regina Costantino
So for you, Paul, Thanks. Yeah, I'm just going to remind everyone, please use the Q and A feature at the bottom of your screen to type in a question which you received on the send. We do have a few questions that do come up throughout the webinar, so I'm going to ask the first one from Paul. The first one talks about when I have approached management in the past about getting software, I run into the same obstacle of we don't have the budget or it's too expensive.
Do you have any suggestions on how to overcome this barrier to work better with that team?
Paul Lachance
Yeah, that is a great question. It comes up all the time, you know, we can't afford the solution or I don't have a budget for the solution and it's completely understandable. You know, these are challenging times and I totally respect that challenge. It is an investment. My recommendation to anybody who wants to go and fight and often it is a fight to get the budget is you come armed with some of the data that I shared with you today, and that's something that this webinar is this that the data, the slides from here, I'm sure can be delivered, show your management, show those finance people, we can't afford not to do this.
We got hurt with X hours of downtime last year or we had a compliance day because of this issue. That cost of X, when you start to at the cost of not having a solution versus what it cost to implement it, the hard dollars that you will say more than justify, not to mention all the soft value of the improved operations, the better morale and so forth.
So there are all kinds of use cases with case studies, with real data in them that you can come armed with. And that's something that if you continue the conversation with, rightly asked your counterpart here, if you're having that challenge, be armed with that information so that you can do that because this is an investment that pays off overwhelmingly and really relatively very, very quick.
Good question.
Regina Costantino
Thank you. Would you have another one? This is more in terms of, you know, accepting the new software technology. The question is some of our team members have resources, software and new technology. In the past, do you have any recommendations on how we can get accept them or steps to help them take that and accept it to make it overall, you know, a positive change for the team and for the business?
Paul Lachance
Yeah, that's another good question. And, you know, we're kind of seeing like I studied a whole industrial manufacturing landscape and there's sort of two camps of users and I'm one of the older I am on the older end of the spectrum, changed of my hair proves that I've been around for decades here. Years ago technology like seem a mess.
The old school was like, Oh, I don't want to use software. And you have those challenges. The younger generation. It's becoming easier to implement technology because they grew up with it. So from that standpoint, but whether it's the younger generation or the older generation, I really believe if you're going to implement, if you're going to really implement technology, don't just cram it into the team.
Include the team to participate in an appropriate manner to get their feedback for what are your challenges that you're seeing and let brightly your talent representative show you how these challenges can work for the team, including the naysayers on including the naysayers on They don't want to use technology and let them see it. I've been in so many presentations of technology to all generations of users.
You let them see it and you let them see the value. They're going to accept it a lot more readily. And the converse when they show up to work on a monday and you say, Hey, we're going to use our new CNN, that's software, don't do that. Let them be a part of the solution in an appropriate way.
And again, we can help manage that. Those expectations in that process.
Regina Costantino
That seems to be it. Paul, I want to thank you for answering those questions and for a great presentation. I did want to thank everyone for attending. This concludes our webinar and we hope you found the presentation useful and learn more about the essentials and how it can help promote uptime and mitigate risks. And in the food and beverage industry, we're going to hang it up now.
But if you want to at any point reach out to us, fill in a question in the chat or request to speak with us and we'll be more than happy to go deeper into discussion with you. Thank you again, everyone, and have yourself a great day.
Paul Lachance
Thanks.
