How RS Industria has helped a leading food producer maintain uptime, reduce costs and protect bird welfare

As a food manufacturer, we know it is critical that you maintain consistency in your operations to ensure animal welfare, guarantee food quality and safety, and protect your hard-earned reputation. 

With budgets under constant pressure, it is also essential you avoid unplanned maintenance and costly downtime. Is it really possible, though, to combine both objectives?

By leveraging the power of RS Industria, the simple answer is yes. RS Industria is a simple, affordable modular platform that provides the insight your engineering teams need to make informed maintenance decisions and identify and fix component or asset issues before they snowball into line-stoppers.

Using continuous monitoring solutions, digitally connected assets and cloud-based collation and analysis of data, RS Industria gives you a single overview of site performance and delivers real-time alerts on issues before they lead to costly downtime.

Del Tiwana, the Sales & Service Delivery Director at RS Industria, explains: "Our collaboration extends across various enterprises within the F&B sector, ensuring seamless operation of production lines, ultimately leading to increased productivity and revenue. Moreover, RS Industria proves instrumental in curbing energy consumption, enabling companies to reduce emissions as they progress towards achieving Net Zero."

So how does RS Industria work in practice? For one leading UK food producer, partnering with RS to implement the solution has saved thousands of pounds, averted hours of lost productivity, and helped to protect animal welfare.

Every year, the firm’s poultry processing lines supply major retailers and food service providers with millions of products.  With facilities operating 364 days a year and at least one of its poultry processing lines in use 24/7, maintaining uptime is critical, and maintenance needs to be planned well in advance.  To ensure continued productivity and protect the welfare of its birds, the customer wanted greater transparency of the performance and reliability of its production lines.

Leveraging the power of RS Industria has delivered value in rapid time for the business.  Within days of implementing the continuous monitoring solution, insight showed issues with key components that, left unseen or unremedied, could have had a catastrophic effect on production.

Fig 1: Data from RS Industria platform highlights a broken input pinion when running at speed with low torque, resulting in increased demand on subsequent drives.

Del explains: “RS Industria data from an inverter on the Chill Chain line showed low torque on the first of the three consecutive drives, even when it was running at speed. This immediately highlighted an issue within the gearbox, with prompt investigation revealing a broken input pinion.”

Fig 2: Data shows a sudden change in torque around 3 drives, on-site inspection revealed a worn corner wheel.

With warning alerts in place to trigger immediate investigation, the customer’s engineers were able to carry out data-informed maintenance and avert costly downtime, saving thousands of pounds in the process.

Meanwhile, further insight flagged other issues within the chiller, including worn bearings and a worn corner wheel which, left to fail, could have impacted on quality and proved costly. In total, RS Industria and the customer estimate the solution has so far saved the business upwards of £60,000 plus the cost of parts and labour.

Fig 3. Energy consumption comparison of two identical assets, we can clearly see the difference between the known worn bearings and those recently replaced. Data allows insight into the degradation.

We know that downtime is costly to the performance of your business. It also wastes the time of your engineers who would rather be working on planned maintenance jobs than scratching their heads trying to get to the bottom of machine and component faults.

By using RS Industria, you can level up your journey to predictive maintenance, optimise your operations and protect your company’s overarching goals of safety, animal welfare, sustainability and competitiveness.

Download the full case study here https://www.rs-industria.com/case-study/meat-processing

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