THE BEER PACKAGING FACILITY PART III - THE MAINTENANCE INVOLVED

WALTON FRENDO, BEER PACKAGING MAINTENANCE MANAGER

Maintenance plays a very important role in today’s production lines, where almost everything is automated. This advancement has been beneficial to production efficiency, product quality, as well as to employees’ working conditions. All this emphasizes the central role maintenance has nowadays.

Maintenance at the Beer Packaging is categorized into three sections. The first section is the first line maintenance. This refers to the interventions required by the production team. Usually the technician, supervised by the process leader, mediates to fix the problem at hand so that production can resume at the designed speed without any quality issues. The production line has a built-in data capturing system whereby all the machines are connected to a central network system, where information is gathered, compiled and displayed in a graphical form.

different machines are tackled. This provides improvement in real time, offering the proactive approach we encourage at the Beer Packaging Facility.

The second section involves the second line of maintenance, which tackles the most common problems shown by the data. The information is utilized in a Kobetsu activity. This involves setting up a team with a champion in charge. For example, Antoine Dimech is the champion for the Variopac machine, while Reuben Gatt is the champion for the fillers. A SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goal is set, followed by several meetings involving brainstorming, 5why analysis, Ishikawa analysis, and other engineering tools. All the actions are put in the PDCA excel sheet and are followed up on a weekly basis, evaluating the actions and results.

A part of the second line of maintenance is “preventive maintenance”, based on the production running hours. For example, each 120 hours trigger a weekly preventive maintenance for each machine. Mainly, preventive maintenance involves checking a certain area and replacing certain parts which are known to be worn out over time. One recent example was the bottlewasher sprayers overhaul, where all the sprayers where disassembled and cleaned, and all the seals in the process replaced. Preventive maintenance is scheduled offline, making the work less expensive than first line maintenance, due to, for example, parts availability, courier costs, production stoppages, etc.

During normal production, the technician retrieves all the errors generated during the first hours of production. By using the Pareto analysis, the top three errors from

The third line of maintenance is at the final maintenance section. This refers to the ongoing improvement tasks undertaken by the maintenance team to increase efficiencies, as well as to obtain a safer and easier work environment. The ideas are generated mostly from the production team. After a brainstorming session, the best action is put into a PDCA where the project cycle is followed. Some other ideas come from the company’s AIM (All Ideas Matter) scheme which helps to provide a platform where everybody can express their concerns or suggestions in a systematic way. by-step functions that one has to perform, highlighting the tools and the knowledge necessary for the process to be successful every time. Maintenance standard work is used for common corrective actions to reduce repair time. In the case of daily preventive maintenance it reduces action time and at the same time maintains the required quality. new part was installed and not left out.

One of the recent improvement actions which was implemented at the Beer Packaging involved the pack inspector in the Variopac machine. A while back we had received a complaint that one of the packs had a missing can, but since the case was fully enclosed (with carton) the case remained unnoticed because before the improvement there was no inspection. The team, comprised of different talents, came up with the design which was accepted by management. The machine was built, tested and fully operational making our line more reliable. The cost for such an inspection machine would have been a lot more had it been purchased from Krones.

Another important section of improvement maintenance is the standard work tool. Standard work is a LEAN process where the work performed is documented so that a single uniform structure is tried and executed. Standard work carries step-

A recent standard work activity was the can filler overhaul, where the preventive maintenance of the can filler valves was scheduled. This involved a lot of maintenance work where several small parts for each of the machine’s 52 valves were changed. To have a structural “fail-safe” system, the maintenance technical documentation was formulated in such a way that it showed a step-by-step sequence of the maintenance required and carried out. To facilitate the work and avoid mistakes, each valve had a specific bag containing all the spare parts required, labelled as per documentation. When each valve was refurbished all the parts had to be changed and the old parts had to be put in a bag labelled with the respective valve number. In engineering this technique is called Pokayoke, a Japanese term for “mistake proofing”. This technique is used to indicate a design choice or apparatus that imposes restrictions on how an operation can be carried out to force the user to do so correctly. In our case all the parts had to be used, and all the old parts had to be retrieved to ascertain that each

With all these systems one can never over-emphasize the important role the team has in making all this work. Success is only possible with the proper discipline, the vast experience, and the good will from each and every member. The Beer Packaging team has all these skills, and provides continuous improvement through its maintenance team. We look forward to the future, in which the world is becoming ever more digitalized with each day that passes – and the maintenance sector is no exception.

Specifically designed applications are available, where all the maintenance activities are gathered, promoting Artificial Intelligence behaviour such that error is avoided by using history and machine data. Our current systems are mostly comprised of excel files built inhouse to gather or store data according to our needs with certain limitations. With the new technology and software, maintenance in the future is set to change with the introduction of self-diagnostic tools, virtual assistance through smart glasses, and other innovative inventions.