The Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) is a team of improvement specialists that are dedicated to providing manufacturers in Illinois with the tools and techniques to excel and compete globally.

IMEC contracted Fuss & O’Neill’s Manufacturing Solutions, LLC to help one of IMEC’s clients, a Midwest foods industry company, who was experiencing significant sales growth that was being constrained by plant capacity due to extensive equipment downtime.

Fuss & O’Neill Manufacturing Solutions, LLC performed a maintenance assessment to identify necessary areas of improvement and to formalize the company’s maintenance management process. The results of the assessment showed that the maintenance function needed a compete overhaul. Fuss & O’Neill Manufacturing Solutions, LLC was then contracted to provide monthly services to guide and implement the creation of a proactive approach to achieving equipment performance.

In our first year of providing support, our team implemented a computerized maintenance management system and trained employees to plan, schedule, and track maintenance work and spare parts inventories. We then created and implemented a preventative and predictive maintenance program.

In the second year, a new maintenance manager was selected, and we provided onboarding services and performance coaching and mentoring. Our team also created the plant’s energy control procedures.

In the third year, we helped the maintenance team create a process to track and trend equipment failures that began a cross-functional permanent corrective action process utilizing the participation of operations, quality, sanitation, and maintenance personnel. Additionally, we helped the new maintenance manager develop the capabilities needed to support and manage capital improvement projects. Continuation of performance coaching efforts has resulted in the maintenance manager’s abilities to coach staff, leading to additional improvements.

In the fourth year, the foods industry company achieved a proactive maintenance function. Our team provides ongoing support, which is continuing to improve safety, quality, and delivery at their facilities, and uptime has provided the capacity they require to grow and expand into new markets.

The plant now achieves previous weekly schedules in four days as versus the previous requirement of five to six days, thus creating capacity to grow.

The Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) is a team of improvement specialists that are dedicated to providing manufacturers in Illinois with the tools and techniques to excel and compete globally.

IMEC contracted Fuss & O’Neill’s Manufacturing Solutions, LLC to help one of IMEC’s clients, Sensient Technologies, increase their production capacity, which was being hampered by extensive equipment downtime. Fuss & O’Neill’s Manufacturing Solutions, LLC provided a three-day workshop focused on preventative and corrective maintenance (with the goal of restoring plant assets to proper operating conditions) and the creation of an implementation plan for Sensient Technologies to begin their improvement efforts.

The intent of the workshop was to teach Sensient Technologies’ employees how to create work instructions for preventative maintenance activities and corrective maintenance repairs and how to schedule them to maximize utilization of available scheduled downtime. Additionally, the workshop taught the participants how to create tasks that would ensure that repairs and inspections would address known performance deficiencies and permanently correct them, improving the mean time between failures for the production lines.

Workshop participants were shown how to schedule packages of work that made the best use of available time. They were taught how to create kits containing all necessary instructions, materials, and tools to ensure that available repair time was utilized efficiently and that non-value-added activities and rework were minimized.

During the workshop, the team was tasked to create and execute multiple planned work activities and to develop a standard process to continue at the workshop’s conclusion.

Following the workshop, Sensient Technologies implemented a full-time maintenance position of Maintenance Planner/Scheduler and began implementing the new standard processes.