In an annual checkup on the state-of-the-maintenance department, the diagnosis is deteriorating, and the prognosis is not good for many bakeries and snack producers.

Chronic labor woes have not improved, and in some cases, have become worse despite heightened awareness of the issue by the associations and the industry over the past few years.

Skilled mechanics are seeking better opportunities in the broader manufacturing sector with better hours and higher compensation.

Working on weekends or the graveyard shift can be a rough sell.

“The industry has not done enough to make this line of work sound and feel enticing, and mechanically talented workers are finding other ways to go,” said Jeff Dearduff, veteran bakery engineer and president of JED Manufacturing Services. “Jobs with weekends off along with four- or three-days-a-week shift schedules, and predictable work-life balance rule the day. We thought that we could go to the technical schools and recruit, but many of those resources have dried up due to lack of interest.”

The symptoms of this stressful situation are showing up throughout bakery operations. On the production floor, short-staffed departments result in overworked mechanics who have to prioritize what equipment gets preventive maintenance and other systems that need to be nursed back to health. 

“What’s actually happening? Maybe everything doesn’t get maintained. You begin to only fix what’s broken,” said Rowdy Brixey, president of Brixey Engineering. “Because of the labor shortage, you’re going to start to have gaps, and gaps eventually become problems. Now when you do shut down, you fix the most important problem, but you’re really not doing anything to prevent a higher multitude of problems for the next shutdown. You’re having what I call a ‘cascading run to failure.’ ”

What gets neglected and goes unnoticed the most? First, Mr. Brixey said, anything that’s out-of-sight and out-of-mind, like routine exams of the building, roof, gutters, intake vents, exhaust stacks, drains and more. Second, regular testing of redundant systems like boilers and air compressors also gets delayed until they begin to fail and need critical care.

“The danger is ‘When does the run to failure become more than just a mechanical breakdown? What if it impacts food safety, people safety or causes a recall?’ ” Mr. Brixey asked. “You eventually will address these problems when they hit you in the back pocket or when you fear that they will affect your pocketbook. You have to ask, ‘Do I have the time and talent available in the next shutdown window to address these potential failures before they happen?’ ”

It’s as if the maintenance crew, which monitors the health of equipment, has become the patient that needs some intensive care to stabilize a bakery’s operation. While the current macro conditions of maintenance remain incurable, bakeries can try several prescriptions to mitigate the situations in their facilities.

Throughout his career in bakery operations, Jeremiah Tilghman, now chief operations officer of Better Butter, Salt Lake City, has found repeated success when combining maintenance and sanitation under a single technical service team to improve efficiency and operational effectiveness. 

“Both maintenance and sanitation have the same downtime activities. The master sanitation schedule is much like a preventive maintenance schedule, so we’ve combined those two teams under one umbrella and under one leadership,” said Mr. Tilghman, who previously worked at Flowers Foods, Canyon Bakehouse and Bimbo Bakeries USA. “I’ve done that three times at three different locations, and now we do it at the butter plant, and it seems to work really well. I would highly encourage that.”

Under the system, he added, new hires first work up the sanitation ladder before transitioning to maintenance. That way, a junior maintenance technician is trained to remove the belt, clean the crumbs out of the bearings and replace it without the help of sanitation. On more complex maintenance projects, the two crews work hand-in-hand with the entire department under the same leadership.

“The technical service manager is running all ‘down-day activities’ as head of the technical support team,” Mr. Tilghman said. “We don’t have a sanitation manager or a plant engineer, but we do have a technical service manager who has a ‘dotted line’ to the director of food safety, compliance and regulatory.”

With changeovers, he explained, production operators are trained to clean, lube and inspect equipment and do routine tasks such as changing a slicer blade before it breaks. Mechanics then conduct “doctors’ rounds,” where they check in with operators every hour, no matter if the line is running or not.

During these rounds, the mechanics receive feedback from operators and document concerns about bearing noise, overheated motors, bagger performance, divider accuracy and more.

This focus frees up maintenance time and labor by monitoring the health of a production line in a more preventive than reactive way.

“It’s like checking your blood pressure or cholesterol levels,” Mr. Tilghman said. “You don’t want to wait to have a heart attack. Go get the bloodwork done routinely and monitor your pressure.”

Mr. Brixey urged maintenance managers to walk the production floor and “trust but verify” all work that’s completed to ensure that it’s done properly, and the line is operating as expected. He also used a medical analogy to hammer home the point.

“It’s like assuming that your new diet and exercise program is impacting your blood sugar or your blood pressure in a positive way,” he said. “You eventually need to check your insulin level or monitor your blood pressure to verify that you’re actually getting the benefits you expected.”

Far too often, Mr. Brixey added, maintenance supervisors rely on daily or weekly reports filled with key performance indicators and other data that are lagging indicators of their departments’ performance.

“Nothing will yield as much fruit as going out and interacting with equipment and the person responsible for that machine,” he noted. “If I find a problem before it becomes part of next week’s report, I get a chance to correct it before it impacts the bottom line, whether it be just time saved or money or both.”

This article is an excerpt from the November 2023 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Maintenance, click here.