With labor-tight bakeries crunched for capacity, eliminating unnecessary downtime has become essential to ensure they reliably meet their customers’ demands for their products.

That’s why there’s an increasing focus on tools that provide predictive maintenance.

At the 2022 International Baking Industry Exposition, Unifiller Systems launched its Total Care by Unifiller app that works on new and existing equipment to provide real-time metrics to users via their phone or tablet and notifies them to order parts before they’re needed.

“This means customers no longer have to actively monitor their machine metrics, thereby allowing them to focus on other activities,” explained Mauricio Nahum, applications manager for Unifiller Systems.

He added that the app’s recipe storage also provides quicker startup times and less waste at the beginning of a product run or during changeovers.

Burford Connect Plus is a subscription cloud-based platform that allows the company to track wear parts and provide predictive maintenance on all its equipment and give that feedback to bakeries in real time.

“Bakers can log into the system, which is tied to a specific serial number and provides live tracking of cycles, hours of operation and run time status of all of the critical wear parts on the machine,” said Clay Miller, president, Burford Corp. “When it reaches a critical point in the life of those wear parts, it sends out alarms.”

Norm Searle, sales and marketing, GOE/Amherst Stainless Fabrication, pointed out real-time monitoring takes the guesswork out of maintenance and even enables bakers to adjust their process to reduce waste and enhance operating efficiencies.

“The ability to remotely monitor equipment operation has advanced significantly, which allows for observing trends and rapidly reacting to conditions when the product is out of spec,” he said.