Milling & Baking News - September 24, 2019 - 18

Business

Rich IoT opportunity seen in
bakery maintenance
LAS VEGAS - While incorporating the
internet of things (IoT) into baking plants
may seem like a futuristic and daunting
leap for industry executives, modest introductions of this rapidly growing technology into facility maintenance are simple
and valuable, said Jay Wright, vice-president of sales and marketing, Somax, Inc.,
Alpharetta, Ga.
By incorporating interconnected sensors
to monitor the temperature of baking equipment, bakers have the potential to save on
labor costs and reduce the risk of damaging
equipment and costly downtime, he said.
Mr. Wright spoke Sept. 7 at IBIE 2019
on how IoT will be incorporated into the
maintenance function of the baking industry in the coming years.
The case for IoT in baking maintenance
has become increasingly compelling because of the lack of resources bakers have
to devote to maintenance, excessive paperwork in maintenance, the increasingly
complicated array of software involved
in bakery production today and what
Mr. Wright said was a lack of support for
maintenance from management.
Even more important, he said, is the increasing shortage of skilled maintenance
personnel available in the marketplace. He
cited data indicating about 700,000 maintenance jobs opened in the United States
recently. Young people currently aren't
being trained in industrial arts courses for
the multi-faceted work required of maintenance staff, and many of the most talented of these workers employed currently
are rapidly approaching retirement age.
The challenge of rising labor costs
prompted the baking industry to pursue production automation decades ago,
Mr. Wright said, adding that automating
maintenance operating is the next frontier.
He described IoT as: "Interconnected devices usually going to the cloud or some central hub, gathering individual points of data
going to the cloud or where it is processed.
All that information can be brought back
and something tangible or useful comes out
of it," generally to mobile devices.
By 2020, 20 billion devices globally will
be connected by IoT, a figure he said is "just
scratching the surface of its potential."
The key to deriving value from IoT is
not the gathering of the data, but generating information that is accessible and
may be insightfully applied and shared
throughout a company, he said. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) gather
data, but it is isolated, Mr. Wright said.
As an example of how IoT may be used
in baking, he suggested the installation of
18 / September 24, 2019

Milling & Baking News

$100 sensors on a piece of baking equipment that will replace weekly or monthly
inspections of the equipment. By contrast,
the sensor will check on the device once a
minute. Next is communication through
gateways that gather data and push it to the
cloud. He recommends a cellular gateway.
He noted that currently if a piece of
equipment begins having trouble after an
inspection, days if not weeks may pass
before the problem is identified, leaving
the device prone to damage. Continuous
sensoring identifies a problem as it develops and alerts staff whether the staff is
present at the plant or not.

Jay Wright, Somax, Inc.

Mr. Wright said baking is 5 to 10 years
behind many other industries in adopting IoT for maintenance, a delay that has
been beneficial to the real degree the cost
of IoT has been declining.
While many baking operations managers identify vibration as a good test case
for using sensors, Mr. Wright advocates
heat sensors as a better starting point. He
said detecting changes in vibrations is
complex, while heat sensors are capable
of identifying a wide range of issues, including low oil in a gear box, alignment
issues, binding issues, loose or faulty wiring and bearing issues. Importantly, heat
detection allows the baker to catch problems before significant damage occurs.
Success with IoT comes not just from
identifying problems, Mr. Wright said.
Developing checklists/procedures for
what to do with the information is key.
To begin using IoT, he said a baker
could buy a number of wireless temperature sensors and run them for one
to two weeks to establish a baseline for
normal temperature. Notification thresh-

olds would then be set. For instance, at
a 10% divergence from target, the maintenance crew would be altered to check
the device for a number of potential
problems. If the divergence grew, say to
15%, maintenance work would be done.
If the divergence grew still further, management would be notified of impending
downtime while the equipment and its
line were shut down for maintenance.
The cost savings from implementing
IoT may be extraordinary, Mr. Wright
said. A maintenance worker may spend
30 minutes each week to inspect a machine. At $17.50 a week, the cost would
come to about $910 per year. Using a sensor will cost about $150 the first year (including $100 for the sensor) and $50 per
year afterward. IoT will not eliminate the
need for maintenance staff but will reduce their numbers, Mr. Wright said.
Drilling deeper into the workings of IoT
for maintenance, Mr. Wright said smartphones and tablets should be the device of
choice for incorporating this technology.
"Smartphones are the new clipboards,"
he said.
Reducing plant noise by eliminating
communications through intercoms or
walkie-talkies is another plus.
Maintenance and sanitation workers
should not be sent to personal computers for information or to input information, Mr. Wright said. The workers are the
most highly paid at a plant and often are
not talented when it comes to personal
computers. IoT maintenance and sanitation documentation should be done on
mobile devices.
Other examples for use of IoT in bakeries Mr. Wright cited ranged from sensors
of moisture and humidity and air compressors ("nothing shuts down a plant
faster than a lack of air compressors") to
rodent traps.
"Understand that you don't need to do
everything at once," he said. "Don't try
to bite off too much. We can start with
a slow, methodical approach. It's a path
to digital transformation. We have no
choice. The people aren't there."
Over time, Mr. Wright said marrying
IoT with big data will allow bakers to
compare maintenance across multiple
plants. Even further in the future, sensors
will be able to predict problems and offer prescriptions. For example, a system
could warn a plant "Mixer 3 has a bearing
that will fail in three to four weeks. Do
you want to order a replacement now?
"We have to adapt. How is the IoT
changing maintenance? We're making it
possible to do it now. Right now we're
struggling. Plants I talk to have four or
five openings for every shift. We have to
get to a better way." MBN
bakingbusiness.com / world-grain.com

http://www.bakingbusiness.com http://www.world-grain.com

Milling & Baking News - September 24, 2019

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