Your Summer Shutdown

Summer shutdown – a time of opportunity!

Every manufacturer understands the value and importance of properly maintained plant and machinery but maintenance means downtime and downtime means lost production opportunity. Sometimes it can be easy to just keep the plant running and hope for the best!

For most of us, summer means holidays, ice-creams and time for with the family, but life goes on in the world of work and matching the time when production staff want to take holidays with an opportunity to carry out planned maintenance on critical process equipment is a great way to help ensure production efficiency is sustained over the coming year.

While skimping on maintenance may give you a short term opportunity, some level of equipment inefficiency or failure down the line is almost inevitable, and what is the cost then?:

1. Plant downtime when you can least afford it
2. Extended delays waiting for delivery of spares
3. Failure to meet production schedules
4. Lost opportunities to work for new customers
5. Delays in delivery of existing orders
6. Risk of customers looking elsewhere

Have you ever experienced problems resulting from a lack of planned maintenance?

Downtime arising through equipment failure resulting from poor maintenance almost always seems to happen at the worst possible time. What is more, emergency, or other unplanned maintenance, often takes longer to complete and at greater cost. Is it really worth the risk?

Joshua Greaves work with our customers to make sure mixers and associated vessels and other plant are fully maintained and always ready to work.

We have developed this checklist to help make certain nothing is missed as maintenance is scheduled.

If you are looking to refresh your own procedures, we hope it might give you some ideas:

1. Check stock of critical spares and subsequent replacement procedure
2. Schedule of repair and personnel availability (in-house or out sourced)
3. Collate Manufacturers maintenance and safety checklistsVessel – inspection & pressure testing etc.
4. Mixing system – High shear mixer rotor tolerances, bushes etc..
5. Shaft seals – lubrication, tolerances etc.
6. Drive unit
7. Control panel
8. Cooling systems
9. Ancillary equipment

Although many companies successfully run their own maintenance programmes, some people appreciate the support of specialists in making sure equipment maintenance is second to none.

Joshua Greaves have used their experience of mixers and vessels over nearly 100 years to develop MixCare™, a dedicated maintenance service tailored to help keep your processes running efficiently.

If you would like to talk to us about supporting your maintenance programme, we still have small number of MixCare™ introduction appointments available, please visit the Greaves Mixcare™ page for more details