Abe Mejos, Darigold’s Corporate Maintenance and Reliability Engineer, explains how Augury insights reduced stress for his team and provided “light at the end of the tunnel.”
Darigold’s Challenges:
- Rising costs, labor shortages, and economic uncertainty put pressure on dairy manufacturers
- Reducing failures and costly delays is critical
- Shifting from reactive to proactive maintenance is a top priority
Why They Chose Augury:
- Cutting-edge technology for predictive maintenance
- Actionable diagnostics to prevent failures
- Strong customer support and partnership
Results and Impact:
- In six months, Darigold avoided 105 hours of downtime, saving nearly $1M
- Real-time insights help teams prevent breakdowns, reduce stress, and improve efficiency
Partnership & Future Growth:
- Darigold trusts Augury and plans to expand Machine Health monitoring across more equipment and facilities
- Excited to see the teams embrace it and use it to make their workdays better and more productive
Darigold’s Corporate Maintenance and Reliability Engineer Abe Mejos talked to Augury Customer Advocacy Manager Amy Stack about bottom-line benefits, the power of predictive technology, and the excitement of creating a vision for the future.
Amy Stack: Hi, Abe. Thanks for sitting down to talk about Darigold and Augury. First, tell us about your background and your current role.
Abe Mejos: Sure, and thank you, Amy. I’m the Corporate Maintenance and Reliability Engineer across all facilities for Darigold, a dairy manufacturing company. My job consists of helping the company establish reliability programs, but more specifically developing programs for predictive technologies – implementing solutions to monitor machine vibration, oil analysis, and other aspects around plant assets. I’ve been in the industry as a maintenance and reliability engineer for the last 20 years.
Amy: Tell me about the kind of challenges you face in the food and beverage industry.
Abe: I’d say our top three challenges are rising operational costs, labor shortages, and ongoing economic uncertainty, mostly due to political uncertainty around the globe. As far as maintenance initiatives go, right now our company is focusing on moving from a reactive maintenance approach to a predictive/prescriptive strategy.
Amy: Why is moving to a predictive/prescriptive approach to machine health so important? Is it all about costs?
Abe: Much of it is about costs. The less interruption, delay, and downtime at a facility, the more revenue you realize. In order to be a top-performing company, downtime needs to be less than 5 -7% of equipment availability–meaning the company should be running within at least 90% efficiency.
In order to improve reliability and efficiency, you should be thinking outside the box, asking yourself what’s really possible. For us, that means understanding the PF interval curve, which is the health of an asset over a period of time. That involves knowing factors such as what domains do we need to look at in terms of failure events, or how quickly a technician discovers that a piece of equipment is about to need repair. And all of this is really hard to track or see unless you have some kind of innovative technology that will detect them.
“Since implementing Machine Health, we have been able to identify failures before they happen, in our fans, pumps, and other critical assets. The technology unveils exactly what is happening inside of that component.”
Amy: How did you go about finding the right technology for that specific need or use case?
Abe: Well, Darigold searched for not just the right technology but the right partner that could provide the kind of services we needed – for example condition-based vibration monitoring technology. We identified Augury as a leader in this kind of approach. We saw that they could provide a leading machine diagnostic tool that could detect early stages of failures in all types of rotating equipment.
Since implementing Machine Health, we have been able to identify failures before they happen, in our fans, pumps, and other critical assets. The technology unveils exactly what is happening inside of that component. For example, if there’s a problem with the bearing, Augury technology identifies what part of the bearing is the problem, or what part of the shaft has the problem. It can alert us to problems with structural integrity in a fan, with assistance from a vibration analyst who can isolate those signatures in the vibration data.
This technology is truly cutting-edge. We started six months ago and are monitoring at least 34 assets right now. We identified these assets based on criticality. If one of these assets fails, production would shut down, so they need to be monitored closely. We’ve seen a substantial return on investment and are so excited about the decision.
Amy: Will you tell me more about that ROI and share an example of how the technology worked on a specific machine?
Abe: I mentioned that we started monitoring 34 assets. Within a time period of approximately six months, we had already avoided 105 hours of delay, which equates to nearly one million in cost avoidance for the company. So that’s a really, really exciting thing that we saw just within the trial period.
Early on in the trial an Augury sensor detected an anomaly with a fan bearing. If that fan were to fail, it would cause a substantial delay in production – maybe 12 hours or more. So the team in our facility was alerted and we discussed how to proceed. We waited a couple of days to validate the data, making sure it was true. But the data does not lie. It will always say if there’s something going on. It’s a fact and that’s the reality.
Amy: How do you see maintenance and reliability at Darigold changing in a more strategic way?
Abe: We are trying to integrate the technology into our maintenance processes and work management – creating work orders ahead of time, getting resources planned in advance such as parts we might need that have a long lead time or identifying contractors. All of these efforts help us avoid delays later and help us improve efficiency and safety for our maintenance workers.
“It’s given [our maintenance teams] a less stressful mindset, a less stressful life because they don’t get phone calls in the wee hours calling them in to work on equipment that is failing or that needs immediate attention. They can sleep well during the night.”
Amy: What’s been the impact on your team?
Abe: It’s given them a less stressful mindset, a less stressful life because they don’t get phone calls in the wee hours calling them in to work on equipment that is failing or that needs immediate attention. They can sleep well during the night because they trust that their equipment is being monitored and we know exactly what’s going on by having this Augury technology.
Amy: How has the broader Augury partnership been for you and your team?
Abe: Everyone we interact with at Augury has been very approachable, very flexible. We can communicate with them any time and they will respond. They have the expertise, they have the platform that you can really work on and look at the details. You can drill down into the specific information that you want. We are justifying what we invested and we see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Our leadership team is looking forward to expanding the program to more assets at other facilities. It’s very, very fulfilling and I’m very very happy to share that we found the right partnership.
Check out more customer success stories to see how Augury is helping manufacturers predict and prevent machine failures and drive down maintenance costs.
