With a little common sense and preventive care, pizza manufacturers can turn high-maintenance production lines into highly profit ones.

“One of the key areas to reduce waste is to properly maintain your equipment,” noted Nick Magistrelli, vice president of sales, Rademaker USA. “This will minimize downtime and unnecessary waste due.”

He recommended introducing quality control points on pizza production lines and ensuring this data gets entered into a system.

“This feedback will keep the system operating within the required parameters, driving product loss down,” Magistrelli observed. “Production lines with multiple changeovers naturally have more room for error. Optimizing your production schedule will be a good start to maintaining your levels of waste.”

Fritsch, a Multivac Group company, offers Smart Services, which collects data and makes recommendations for action on its Impressa line in advance before a component has the chance to fail.

Randy Kelly, applications specialist with Fritsch, noted the Smart Production Insight application gives production and shift managers real-time information on the line’s performance via its dashboard.

“Even downtimes caused by minor malfunctions are clearly recorded so that measures to prevent them can be initiated quickly and easily,” he explained. “By continuously collecting data and visualizing key performance indicators in real time, significant improvements in overall line efficiency can be achieved.”

Kelly said Multivac, Fritsch’s parent company, also offers a new service for predictive maintenance called Watchdog, which monitors all the drives on the line by measuring and continuously analyzing the motor current and temperature.

“As soon as the value calculated by algorithms reaches a specified deviation from the defined target value, a warning is sent to a defined group of people, who can react accordingly before the drive unit becomes damaged or even destroyed,” he said.

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