Today’s bakers should consider investments that not only boost throughput but also reduce maintenance requirements.

To minimize changeover times, Rowdy Brixey, president of Brixey Engineering, suggested bread and bun plant operators might want to consider mobile toppers, interchangeable conveyors and other systems that they can pull off the line, clean and perform maintenance when not being used.

“Redesigned bread and bun bakeries may need to think more like a cake plant or a plant where everything is somewhat portable,” Brixey said. “Imagine if you could roll the conveyor to your shop for maintenance and then roll it over to the washing area for sanitation before rolling it out to the line so it’s ready to go for the next product. That’s better than, ‘I can’t clean it or maintain it because the line is running,’ even though that topper or seeder is not in use.”

If necessary, it may make sense to invest in redundant systems that can keep production running while other equipment pieces are cleaned and maintained.

Moreover, Brixey said, don’t underestimate the value of toolless components from a maintenance perspective.

“Time is your enemy, no matter how you look at it,” he pointed out. “It takes either more time to disassemble and put back together a machine, or less time, and can we give the balance back to production or sanitation? We’re freeing up some of that ‘trap time’ and that’s the positive impact of this labor crisis because people have the tools to do their work more quickly.”

To assist with troubleshooting, Jeremiah Tilghman, now chief operations officer of Better Butter, Salt Lake City, highly recommended wearable technology, which has become much more affordable in recent years.

Newer smart glasses or headsets allow an operator to collaborate with a maintenance technician who may be offsite at the time of a breakdown or an equipment vendor who can walk with the operator, step-by-step, to resolve an issue. The key, he stressed, is to challenge vendors to also adapt to such technology.

“There’s a lot to be learned here, and the cost of the technology has come down where it’s feasible,” said Tilghman, previously a veteran operations manager in the baking industry.

A growing number of bakeries, however, are in critical condition when it comes to staffing up their maintenance crews. As a result, they have no choice but to work with third parties for contract maintenance, which can get expensive.

With that in mind, bakeries should be strategic in how to use this extra assistance. 

“Bakeries should study how they can apply outside contractors to scheduled down days to get the work done,” suggested Jeff Dearduff, veteran bakery engineer and president of JED Manufacturing Services. “The on-staff mechanics can take care of the daily items, and the contractors can handle the big situations.”

He added that creative production scheduling that creates better work hours will more effectively attract the “dirt-under-the-fingernails crowd.”

Having a fully staffed maintenance crew will then improve a plant’s uptime and, consequently, its overall throughput in the long run. 

“Bakeries want and need to run every hour that they can as volume tries to make up for the tight margins found in this industry,” he explained. “On top of that, poor running lines cause the need for more running hours. It’s a vicious circle. Many times, a bakery’s scheduling favors the production workers, giving them the weekend days and holidays off, leaving those non-production days on the part of the calendar when nobody wants to work.”

The most efficient solution is to break down the barriers between production, sanitation and maintenance and share the workload toward a common goal of boosting throughput to meet growing customer demand.

Brixey pointed out a few solutions that are not that complicated. Shaving off a few minutes of downtime on every shift adds up to big savings over a 12-month period.

“One way production can help is to put more responsibility on the operator to work in conjunction with maintenance and sanitation or get the production line ready for the next shutdown by dumping the trash cans, dust mopping their work areas and reporting any equipment that’s causing issues that affect the line’s performance or product quality issues,” he said.

When it comes to curing the maintenance labor shortage, there’s no magic pill, but bakeries can use multiple strategies to manage their operations today until the situation heals itself perhaps many years from now.

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