The meat industry is traditionally reactive. In most cases we’ve given up on proper reliability strategy because of the assumption it’s not sustainable due to nightly tear downs followed by high pressure and temperature washdowns with chemicals.

But this is simply not true, and the Smithfield Foods Maintenance and Reliability team made it their mission to change this mindset. It all came to LANGUAGE.

• Why we don't get our reliability initiatives funded.
• Why we don't get access to the equipment we need to work on.
• Aligning the asset strategy with the company strategy.
• A satisfied maintenance workforce, with work clarity and accountability.
• Processes that were easy to understand and train on.
• Building a culture that brought operations and maintenance together.
• Ability to choose the right strategy [predictive or preventive or RTF, etc.].
• Simple ways to get back-to-work management fundamentals.
• A tangible 7% gain in operations capacity throughout the company.

Steve is the Director of the Asset Reliability across 42 manufacturing plants for Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, employing more than 50 000 people. Together, Steve and his plant teams jointly created the Smithfield Standard Reliability Process which became a gamechanger in the companies' respect and understanding of Reliability.