Patties Foods Limited is a leading Australian manufacturer, supplier and marketer of branded frozen savoury and dessert products. Their manufacturing facility in Bairnsdale, Victoria is the world's largest meat pie producer and the largest employer in the East Gippsland region.
The project was instigated due to demands from production and management to reduce downtime across the plant. Ausenco Rylson was engaged to perform reliability engineering work to identify reliability issues through analysis of data from the manufacturing IT systems and to develop strategies to address them. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) was used to address fundamental causes of equipment reliability issues.
The project reported directly to the Maintenance and Engineering Manager. As well as RCA the work included general engineering advice on issues as they arose while consulting with all personnel in the Maintenance and Engineering department.
Achievements
Ausenco Rylson analysed the equipment used in the manufacturing process and identified issues that were causing problems such as downtime and waste. Ausenco Rylson made recommendations on specific under-performing assets with the aim of reducing downtime, eliminating waste, reducing energy consumption and optimising labour effort.
Maintenance and engineering process management issues were also identified. Recommendations were made regarding the use of RCA techniques, review and scheduling of maintenance tasks, lines of responsibility and use of the maintenance database for capturing and analysing information.
Implementation of the recommendations will provide significant long term cost savings to Patties Foods Limited by reducing the overall maintenance effort and optimizing maintenance expenditure.