Teamwork is truly a key ingredient in the juiced up production and maintenance efforts at this facility.

The Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc. [OSC] Bordentown, NJ facility was getting a bit “long in the tooth.” Originally constructed in the late 19th century as a Worsted Wool plant and then converted by OSC in 1946, it operated for many years with minimal preventive maintenance. Over time, the facility began having difficulty meeting its obligations. In August 2004, newly appointed plant manager Tim Haggerty and corporate continuous improvement manager Jerry Langley invited Charles Brooks Associates, Inc. (CBA) to conduct a maintenance benchmarking evaluation and help develop an action plan to improve the overall performance of the facility. This process had been used in other OSC facilities for a number of years with great success. Over the course of the next two years, the Bordentown plant began making remarkable improvements in both production and maintenance performance.

During the initial benchmarking by CBA back in 2004, the facility scored 466 out of a possible 1000 on a worldclass maintenance scale. Specific opportunity areas were identified during the survey and recommendations were communicated to the management team during the wrapup meeting. The team was encouraged to:

• Develop and communicate a coordinated plan for asset care improvement.
• Develop effective metrics for measuring maintenance contribution to plant performance.
• Restructure the maintenance function to support the operations.
• Improve the utilization of Maximo:
  • Capture of maintenance costs
  • Analysis of asset performance data
• Determine if assets were capable of performing at required levels (and upgrading if necessary).
• Evaluate maintenance skills and provide the required high-impact training.
• Determine the appropriate maintenance approach for each asset, including center-lining.
• Improve the execution of the planned maintenance process:
  • Level 1 (Operators’) PMs
  • Maintenance PMs
  • Overhauls

The local OSC

management team began to evaluate its staffing and processes immediately after the benchmarking and discovered that it was not prepared to take the plant to the next level. At that point, plant manager Haggerty chose to move the facility out of the reactive maintenance mode into a planned maintenance mode through a series of staff moves and strategic hires.

A plant-wide strategy
In September 2005, Charles Brooks Associates began providing interim maintenance management by assigning Dan Simpson to the facility on a full-time basis. A thorough analysis was made of all hot-fill bottling equipment to determine what steps were required...(Read whole article)