Machinery Lubrication

ML_September-October_2020

Machinery Lubrication magazine published by Noria Corporation

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ML www . machinerylubrication.com | September - October 2020 | 9 T he 2020 calendar year has certa inly brought wit h it many challenges for a variety of industries. The medical f ield, pulp and paper industry and food supply chain have all been significantly impacted by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. At the grocery store, people experienced (or are still expe- riencing) empty shelves, limited food supply and less variety when doing weekly shopping. In March 2020, grocery and supply sales increased 29% from the previous year (3). With this significant change to everyone's daily lives, people imme- diately assumed the nation's food supply must be low, which led to panic buying and hoarding, thus, escalating the problem. e root cause of the problem, however, had very little to do with limited food supply and more to do with global supply chains being shut down around the world due to COVID- 19. is lockdown lead to massive shifts in production and packaging methods, and major delays getting the final products on the shelves. With grocery stores already operating at "just-in-time" inventory levels even pre-pandemic, the strains on the global grocery supply chain due to COVID-19 became all too apparent. Product demand became so high that many production facili- ties did not have the luxury of taking equipment offline for maintenance. In fact, most machines were oper- ating at full capacity. With machines experiencing minima l to zero downtime, predictive maintenance strategies not only became a compet- itive advantage to corporations, but imperative to company operations. While timely delivery of product is always important, the COVID-19 pandemic made it absolutely crit- ical for Spectro Scientific MiniLab customer and grocery distribution center, ES3. Headquartered in Keene, New Hampshire, ES3 provides storage and shipping services for grocery items throughout the United States and has facilities located in Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania. e flagship facility in York, Pennsylvania, ships to more than 300 grocery stores in the Northeast and provides storage services to more than 50 manufac- turing partners. is is one of the largest automated grocery distribu- tion warehouses in the world, with 380,000 pallet storage locations and the capability to ship 5 million cases per week. e York site also holds their in-house lubrication labora- tory and MiniLab 53, supporting nearly 100 critical assets with expansion always on the horizon. They routinely assess samples of gear oil from the two different auto- mated systems at this site, including enclosed gearboxes and robotic arms. Time to Bring In-house: Creating the Reliability Culture In December 2013, Travis Sand- erson, the ACP automation manager at ES3, decided to pursue the idea of building a lubrication laboratory onsite. At that time, Sanderson was working closely with many of the robotics and automation compo- nents within the facility. "We weren't checking our oils and we weren't changing them like we should, and it was starting to cost us a lot of money," he said. "Failures of our machines and our inability to control them were hurting us pretty drastically to the point that it was getting a lot of attention and we needed to find a new strategy of going after it." e new strategy included onsite lubricant analysis that focused on quick ly understanding the oil condition. "We proposed the idea of the lubrication laboratory using the MiniLab and we nailed down work ing on oil integrit y and contamination and trying to get it so that within the hour, we can have a sample of where we stand," said Sanderson. "ES3 is one of the largest automated facilities in the world for distribution of groceries. Every single thing we have in our facility is on a massive scale. With our machines, we have so many

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