Machine Maintenance: The Secret to Quality

If you’re wondering why you need to maintain machines regularly, here’s the answer: Maintenance is critical when it comes to keeping things as reliable as possible.

With the aquaculture industry so focused on the bottom line, the cost of machine downtime has an enormous impact on profitability. When equipment starts to wear, food can be processed with a reduced quality.  

As such, the importance of effective maintenance and service offerings by machine manufacturers cannot be overlooked. Think of it as providing health care to processing machines and equipment.

In the Training and Service episode of Salmon Sessions, host Chris Brow and Dennis Schreiber, Vice President Sales & Service at BAADER, break down the various layers of the BAADER holistic service support—from offering customer staff training to remote and personal service and maintenance delivered by skilled BAADER service technicians.

Keep equipment running efficiently  

BAADER equipment is renowned in the industry for its longevity. By performing regular maintenance, you can help expand the machine’s life and ensure that equipment is operating at 100% efficiency at all times.  

It starts with short daily inspections, cleaning, lubricating, and making minor adjustments. This is how minor problems can be detected and corrected before they become a major problem that shut down your production line.  

Enabling in-house maintenance  

It takes a trained operator to understand the problem and a trained technician to know how to either fix it or alert someone that it needs repairing. BAADER offers professional training for both—on the specific model of equipment they will be using.  

Martin Pietsch has been managing the BAADER Technology Centre since 2019. A mechatronics engineer with over 18 years of experience as a BAADER technician, he possesses deep knowledge and expertise of the BAADER processing solutions, and he enjoys passing it on in his training courses. The BAADER Technology Centre provides an ideal learning environment.  

“In this hall, we can run entire production lines or single machines under production-related conditions,” Pietsch explains, adding about how important it is to train operators and technicians. “Training staff helps prevent repairs due to misuse or overuse of equipment. In our training courses all participants gain something that helps them for their daily work.” Equipped with such skills, “they will get the best out of the machines, and they will increase their performance day by day.”

Enabling operators to be able to take care of small maintenance jobs on the equipment they use is incredibly important. This way, skilled maintenance people can concentrate on value-added activity and technical repairs.  

Skilled and remote service support  

BAADER has a pool of skilled travelling service technicians strategically positioned around the globe in proximity to its customers. As such, technicians can quickly restore system availability in case of a machine failure or downtime.  

“In addition to our well-known on-site service, we provide preventive remote service,” explains Matthias Krellenberg, Deputy Head of After Sales & Service, BAADER “We analyse and optimize the systems remotely to prevent them from sudden failures.”

The BAADER remote service “could be as simple as a smartphone or a tablet, and it could be getting as fancy as goggles with a little monitor,” says Dennis Schreiber, VP Sales & Service. “The expert service technician can render advice to the technician in front of the machine at the customer's side and guide him with his remote annotation and support.”  

The digital tool applied by BAADER is called Smart Assistance, which facilitates a live video connection combined with augmented reality to support customers in real time.

BAADER sees big potential in Smart Assistance when combined with additional digital opportunities.  

The future of maintenance  

Believe it or not, intelligent maintenance systems (IMS) can predict and forecast equipment performance so near-zero breakdown status is possible.  

With modern computing and information technologies, machines can be equipped with sensors on critical parts of their design to warn of potential failures long before they occur so that they can be corrected before they impact production. Additional data can come from the entire enterprise system (including quality data, history and trending). By looking at data from these sources—both current and in a historical context—one can more accurately predict future performance.

BAADER is on the verge of implementing these new service offerings to change maintenance systems into smart service and asset management solutions. From reactive maintenance—"Fail and Fix"—BAADER aims at moving further to "Predict and Prevent" maintenance.  

The BAADER Digitalization unit will play a crucial role in this process. For more information, tune in on November 26th 2 pm GMT+2 for an entire session on digitalization on BAADER Stream.

Watch the entire Service and Training Session.

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