The Importance of Planned Maintenance at the Tequila Industry

How can we carry out an efficient Planned Maintenance these days, with a demand that is constantly growing? Why is it important not only to carry this maintenance out but to do the planning in advance as well? In this blog post, I will share with you how do we handle the Planned Maintenance at Casa Sauza and mention some of the benefits that it offers.

Basics for Planned Maintenance

As with any other process, in order to obtain good results and even exceed expectations, we must first plan:

• All the activities to be carried out
• When should they be carried out
• Who will be in charge of executing them
• What materials or spare parts are needed for their execution
• What will the maintenance cost be overall

In our Planned Maintenance case, this planning has helped us to:

• Focus on the sustainability of our equipments
• Not to loose sight of our planned objectives
• Efficiently cover the requirements of our internal clients
• Most of all, keep a constant and continuous maintenance

An Efficient Planning

What do we need in order to effectively plan preventive and corrective maintenance interventions?

These are some of the things that we, at Casa Sauza, take into consideration when planning our corrective and preventive maintenance.

1.- Define the critical equipments that need maintenance urgently, which doesn't mean we will only focus on these. Maintenance is given to all of the equipment and areas of the company, we only put special care in the planning of the maintenance of these critical equipments and make them a priority.

2.- Based on the experience of the operators, the specialist technicians and the producers of the equipment, we define:

• The activities to be carried out by each machine or equipment
• The intervention frequency for each activity
• A very important issue: Who will be in charge of it? Since they are tasks that due to their complexity, can only be carried out by the producer of the equipment. Yet, there are other activities that, on the beginning, a technician is in charge of carrying them out. Later on, the technician will train the equipment's operator so that he learns how to carry out the maintenance himself, without the need of the technician.

3.- Year after year, budget and manage in advance the costs that the maintenance execution for each equipment and area imply.

4.- Make an interventions calendar at which we can check the monthly Planned Maintenance set for each team and area. This calendar can be consulted by both the Planner and the Specialist Technicians, in order to know -at all times- the plan that was scheduled.

5.- Constant review and continuous update of the active maintenance plans by equipment and area. This is done between the specialist technician and the planner.

6.- In our case, the automation of the launching of preventive orders for maintenance, by means of the SAP system, has helped us to a large extent. It periodically informs us of which maintenance should be executed.

These are the guidelines that we have adopted at Casa Sauza for our PLanned Maintenance. To date, they have helped us to continuously achieve positive results for our objectives. We definitely still have things to improve, which is why we continue working on them by simplifying and automating the activities that we carry out every day, in order to produce the best and purest tequila that you will fin in the market.

I invite you to come to Casa Sauza and learn everything about our tequila production processes. Our experts will gladly answer to any of the questions that you may have.