"This has fundamentally changed the way we approach maintenance."
— Craig Wolfenden, Warburtons, Bolton Head of Maintenance.Warburtons Bolton - Mixer Reliability Recovery
In an industry where high-volume bakery production runs on tight schedules and every minute of downtime is costly, Warburtons is one of the UK’s best-known bread and baked goods manufacturers. Its Bolton site runs continuous, high-throughput production where critical equipment has to perform consistently. However, like many large-scale producers, the site faced a challenge that threatened its ability to protect throughput and keep unplanned downtime down: its maintenance resource was being consumed by reactive repairs.
Problem
The primary issue Warburtons Bolton encountered was that Mixer 1, a critical asset in the production process, was the site’s largest Source of Loss. It suffered repeated downtime events, and the engineering team was spending most of its time firefighting rather than preventing failures. The existing planned maintenance tasks were vague (for example, “check drive belt”), which made them hard to execute consistently and unlikely to catch developing faults.
This was significant because it resulted in lost production, high reactive labour demand, and a real risk of a major mechanical failure, and it left the site’s engineers with no capacity to move towards a proactive maintenance strategy.
Action Steps
To tackle this issue, Warburtons Bolton hired Marmalade Solutions, where we took the following steps:
Step 1: Analysed reported issues and reactive maintenance history to identify what was driving losses, then selected key indicators to baseline.
Step 2: Used condition monitoring and physical inspection to confirm root causes.
Step 3: Delivered a Return to Standard plan and put it into action by managing the needed teams and equipment.
Step 4: Reviewed the existing PMs against OEM recommendations, operating conditions and observed failure modes, and replaced them with a package of 16 new PMs written with one action per step and measurable acceptance criteria.
Step 5: Re-measured the key indicators after the work and compared Mixer 1 against Mixer 2 over a 90-day period.
These actions addressed the problem by fixing the confirmed root causes rather than the visible symptoms, then locking in the improvement with PMs that can be executed the same way by any engineer. The aim was to return Mixer 1 to standard operating condition and free the engineering team from reactive work.
Results
As a result, Warburtons Bolton saw significant improvements. Time to reach 0.6 bar vacuum fell from 150 seconds to 20 seconds, an 87% reduction, and pressure stability moved from oscillating to stable. Time held at vacuum rose from 45 to 130 seconds.
Compared against Mixer 2 over 90 days, Mixer 1 lost 16.6 more production hours and consumed 37.5 more man-hours or an estimated around 150 hours of skilled maintenance labour released and 66.6 hours of downtime saved each year. Mixer 1 has moved from the site’s highest Source of Loss to outside the top 20.
These figures are conservative, as they only measure a return to Mixer 2’s standard and do not include the benefit of the new PMs. The project moved Warburtons closer to its long-term goal of shifting engineering effort from firefighting to proactive, planned maintenance.
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“We engaged Marmalade Solutions to support our Reliability Managers, who were managing a high workload while continuing to develop in their roles. My initial expectation was that they would provide guidance on proven reliability engineering tools and methodologies to help improve asset reliability while coaching our team along the way. What they delivered went far beyond that. Not only did they help us achieve tangible improvements in mixer reliability, but they also collaborated with our software engineer to implement condition monitoring and introduced a new condition-based maintenance approach, where preventative maintenance is triggered by equipment condition rather than fixed schedules. This has fundamentally changed the way we approach maintenance and will become an integral part of how we manage reliability going forward. I’d highly recommend Marmalade Solutions to any organisation looking for practical, innovative reliability engineering support that delivers lasting results.”
— Craig Wolfenden, Warburtons, Bolton Head of Maintenance.