If you’re a food or beverage manufacturing leader looking to build a more efficient, resilient operation and reduce risk, strengthening your maintenance program likely ranks high on your list.
You might also feel stuck. Preventive maintenance schedules never quite keep pace with the chaos of production changeovers, hygiene demands, and nonstop customer pressure. A past predictive maintenance pilot might have promised savings but failed to deliver.
Either way, you’re still battling unplanned downtime that throws schedules off, stresses your crew, and chips away at margins.
Fortunately, predictive maintenance doesn’t have to be a complicated, high-cost experiment. There’s a far simpler approach that puts reliable insights in your hands without burying your team in noise. You’ll see fast adoption, easy asset saves, fewer headaches, steadier output, and a maintenance strategy that finally works with you, not against you.
The Costs and Risks of Unplanned Downtime in the Food and Beverage Sector
When sudden equipment failures strike, they exact a heavy price—one that goes well beyond the cost of emergency maintenance. Every minute of halted production translates to significant product losses, especially when perishable goods are at stake. Wasted raw materials, incomplete batches, and increased scrap rates drive up costs and reduce output and revenue.
• Potential cost per hour of downtime in food and beverage: $30,000
• Food and beverage recalls in 2024: 740+ (more than doubling 2023 total)
• Increase of food units recalled between 2021 and 2022: 700% (a 10-year high)
Not only do efficiency and profitability take a hit, but business and compliance risks loom large. Ongoing compliance with strict health and safety standards demands consistent and steady production. Malfunctioning machinery increases the risk of contamination, leading to potential recalls, legal liabilities, and reputational damage. A single recall can cost millions in lost revenue as well as consumer trust, which can take years to rebuild.
The Potential of Predictive Maintenance
When a predictive maintenance program is working as it should, it empowers teams to achieve and maintain the ideal state in food and beverage facilities. Combining real-time vibration and temperature data, AI asset anomaly and fault detection, and an expert in the loop to detect and address equipment issues in their earliest stages is key to mitigating the substantial costs and risks associated with unplanned downtime.
A successful predictive maintenance program confers other important benefits as well: a culture of continuing improvement, enhanced morale, and a more sustainable operation, to name a few.
In a survey of global food and beverage manufacturers, 48% cited increased production tech as a key opportunity in 2024 and beyond.
What if the potential of predictive maintenance doesn’t match the day-to-day reality for facility teams?
This scenario is not uncommon. The good news is, it’s entirely avoidable. You just need to be armed with the right information before you commit to a predictive maintenance program. Then your team can make the easy shift to AI-enabled, expert-supported condition-based maintenance and start winning on day one.
4 Common Reasons Predictive Maintenance Solutions Fail to Deliver
Given the high standards and high stakes in food and beverage manufacturing, the need to innovate to keep production lines up and running is urgent. But getting the value you expect from a predictive maintenance program can be a challenge when the path to success isn’t clear.
Whether it’s the typical upfront investment, reservations about the new system, or how much value the system can actually deliver, predictive maintenance programs can and sometimes do fail to lift off—thus denying facility teams the financial and human relief as well as the business benefits they seek.
1. Upfront and Ongoing Costs
Many predictive maintenance solutions require a large capital expenditure upfront—typically five-figure investments in hardware and software—just to get started. Additional costs include installation, ongoing service and support, and more.
2. Resistance to Change
Adopting new technologies like AI requires a cultural change that isn’t easy to achieve. Reluctance can stem from concerns about learning to use advanced tools, the effectiveness of a predictive maintenance solution, and what it might mean for the workforce.
3. Lack of Expertise
Many facility teams lack the experience they need to interpret machine data and pinpoint issues that need addressing. If expert support is not readily available to help them identify and prioritize needs—and take the correct course of action—the value of the data plummets.
4. Frustration & Diminishing Returns
Big data can become a big burden. With a steady flow of alerts generated by predictive maintenance software—including false positives—teams can feel overwhelmed and revert to a reactive stance, frantically putting out fires while uncertain about what to tackle next.
Any one of these four main drivers of negative ROI can undermine a predictive maintenance program on its own, or deter manufacturers from considering a move to predictive maintenance in the first place.
The problem isn’t predictive maintenance as a strategy or technology. It’s how well a given system meets operational needs and empowers maintenance and reliability teams to drive progress. Discover how a leading dairy producer saved $120,000 with a single failure prevented, thanks to advanced AI and timely outreach from a condition monitoring engineer. Read their story here.
Your No-Fail Recipe for a Smooth, Steady Production Line with Predictive Maintenance
Having the power to predict and prevent equipment failures—and conquer unplanned downtime for good—means being able to transform your operation, minimize business and compliance risks, and lock in continuous improvement. The question isn’t whether predictive maintenance is necessary, but how you can maximize its value.
Here are four key ingredients you’ll need to ensure long-term program success.
1. Test Before You Invest
In terms of cost, effort, and time to value, a turnkey solution with a monthly subscription has the lowest barrier to entry and offers the most value for the money. With no CapEx required and no additional cost for hardware, software, criticality assessment, installation, ongoing maintenance, and dedicated CAT III+ support, your team can transition to predictive maintenance easily and have everything they need to increase uptime and generate value fast.
Start with a low-cost, no-risk trial. You can see how the system functions within your existing workflows, learn from the expert who’s dedicated to your facility, and rack up some quick asset saves. A trial period takes the pressure off your team while selling them on the value of predictive maintenance and the benefit of building a proactive culture.
A full-service condition monitoring solution that combines the power of predictive analytics with human expertise helps maintenance teams get ahead of failures and do more with less.
2. Empower Your Team with Advanced AI + Human Expertise
As critical as AI is for detecting and flagging anomalies, relying on AI without expert support can lead right back to emergency maintenance on the production line—as well as efforts wasted on troubleshooting and resolving issues that don’t need attention.
For long-term success, balancing predictive analytics with human insight is key.
In addition to helping train AI models, an expert dedicated to your facility can also validate the data, filter out false positives, and prioritize issues based on urgency.
Equally important, you’ll have a partner on hand who will proactively reach out to your team with timely prescriptive recommendations for the earliest, most practical resolution based on equipment placement, operating conditions, and other unique factors.
When vibration readings spiked on a critical compressor, the maintenance team didn’t have to guess what was wrong or scramble under pressure. Their provider’s condition monitoring expert, dedicated to their facility, quickly flagged the issue and recommended they inspect the thrust bearings to head off a shutdown. This partnership not only kept production on track but saved the plant $150,000 in avoided downtime and repairs. Read the full story here.
3. Streamline Workflows with Easy Integrations
The most effective predictive maintenance solutions blend in seamlessly with existing systems to simplify workflows, enhance team collaboration, and improve decision making. Look for a solution that will not only empower your team with dashboard views and two-way communications with a dedicated expert, but also integrate easily with your CMMS system.
This setup will free your team from time-consuming data entry and duplicate efforts. You’ll be able to automate work order generation, prioritize maintenance actions, allocate your resources more effectively, and easily track work orders to closure.
4. Focus on the Right KPIs for Continuous Improvement
Establishing measurable goals that align with organizational goals and KPIs is essential for benchmarking where you are today, driving progress, and demonstrating overall value to the organization. The right mix of historical and actionable maintenance KPIs can not only help you gauge the full impact of your predictive maintenance program, but also uncover opportunities for improving maintenance processes and outcomes going forward.
✅ Download the predictive maintenance checklist
🎧 Listen to the on-demand replay of our recent webinar Maintenance KPIs That Matter
Discover How Easy Predictive Maintenance Can Be
Some of the most complex challenges in food and beverage manufacturing are caused or compounded by sudden, unforeseen failures that stall production. Fortunately, a turnkey predictive maintenance solution can help you make steady production a daily reality and alleviate your biggest operational and compliance risks.
With the power of AI and dedicated support from a seasoned analyst, you can overcome the usual barriers to adoption and progress—and empower your team to win the high-stakes battle against equipment failures.
AssetWatch makes it easy to get started—no CapEx, self-install, or IT involvement required. We’ll help you identify your most critical assets and get you up and running in 1-2 days. And we’ll provide expert support, dedicated to your facility, every step of the way.
Schedule your free expert consultation, and let’s talk about how you can achieve zero unplanned downtime for good.
