innovative Asset Efficiency Optimisation (AEO) service from SKF, the knowledge engineering company, is playing a crucial role at Young’s Seafood, helping the company to develop an effective long term maintenance strategy. In particular, the AEO techniques being employed by Young’s Seafood are providing a framework within which business and production managers can build and test maintenance and operational processes, with the goal of increasing productivity, reducing downtime and cutting ongoing costs.
Founded over 200 years ago, Young’s is one of Europe’s leading producers of high quality and specialised chilled and frozen seafood, with products ranging from luxury shellfish to family fish meals. The company has its headquarters in Grimsby, from where it operates two major manufacturing units, with dedicated product development and quality control facilities; there are further production facilities around the UK, with products being supplied to the market through a wide variety of distributors and major multiples.
Kevin Hamilton, Engineering Manager, for Young’s in Grimsby explains that, “Efficiency, speed of production and delivery, with the highest levels of quality, are among the critical factors that drive our business, ensuring that we provide the best products and services to our customers. We recognised that to ensure we consistently achieved the highest standards we needed to use a process of continuous assessment of all our manufacturing, management and associated business processes. As a result, we have been working closely with SKF and their local authorised distributor, BRT Bearings, to develop an effective maintenance strategy that is integrated into our business processes at three of our production plants in and around Grimsby”.
The AEO philosophy developed by SKF is widely used by many of the world’s leading organisations. For Young’s, the process began with a Client Needs Analysis (CNA), which was then benchmarked against standardised data sets that have been gathered and analysed from across the food and beverage industry.
After agreeing a structure, SKF completed a thorough assessment of current practices at the three manufacturing plants, assessing processes from plant maintenance to operational structures and levels of efficiency. SKF’s AEO team interviewed a wide cross section of Young’s operations and management teams, conducting both group and one-to-one sessions.
Kevin Hamilton highlights the importance of the CNA, “This was carried out in partnership with SKF and BRT Bearings, with their experts working closely with our production and maintenance staff over a period of weeks to investigate key areas of operations. The final report then indentified the strengths and potential weaknesses of our existing procedures. Over forty, key performance indicators, including monitoring, downtime, reactivity, operational risk assessment and failure analysis were used, and each was then benchmarked against SKF’s database of food and beverage sector statistics to show possible problems and areas of excellence”.
The next stage, which is currently ongoing, is the development, roll out and implementation of a detailed maintenance strategy review, utilising Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis. SKF, BRT Bearings and Young’s are conducting joint workshops and training sessions to ensure this knowledge can be reused across the manufacturing facility at Grimsby. The new maintenance strategy will help develop and introduce new maintenance techniques and technologies as part of a three-year maintenance improvement programme.
Kevin Hamilton concludes, “Unlike many providers in this area, SKF and BRT Bearings have done more than just provide a situation analysis. Their experts got under the skin of our business, with a non-intrusive assessment of our current practices, and they have provided recommendations that are closely aligned to our long term business goals. As a result, they are now actively working with our internal teams to help us make real improvements in uptime, productivity and the quality of our products”.
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