Running Maintenance in FMCG Manufacturing With a CMMS

Maintenance rarely gets the spotlight in small-to-mid-size fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) manufacturing. It is the support function that keeps perishable products moving through tight delivery windows, often with a single engineer covering a shift.

Ibnu Pookkayil is Engineering Supervisor at Gosh! Food, a B Corp-certified FMCG manufacturer in Milton Keynes. He has run maintenance on both ends of the scale, from a large plant in Saudi Arabia to a lean UK operation. He joined the Comparesoft CMMS Podcast to explain what good maintenance looks like in FMCG manufacturing, and what an engineering team needs from a Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS).

From 52 Engineers to One per Shift: The Resource Reality of FMCG Manufacturing

Ibnu’s perspective on FMCG manufacturing maintenance is shaped by two very different environments. He began his career in food manufacturing in Saudi Arabia before moving to the UK in 2019, and the contrast in engineering resources was stark.

“Coming from a company in Saudi Arabia where we had about 52 employees just in engineering, to a company that only has one shift engineer per shift, it was quite challenging to start with,” he says. “Any small downtime affects the overall output, because that is what we are there for. We are a support function supporting production.”

The gap is less about headcount than about the breadth of skills available when something goes wrong.

“With a bigger team you have a bigger pool of resources, in manpower and in skills,” he continues. “When you are down to one engineer per shift, the skills are limited. Imagine you have two breakdowns on two different lines and you are the only one to manage them both. That is quite challenging, and it can be stressful.”

How to Prioritise FMCG Breakdowns When Two Lines Go Down at Once

A lone FMCG engineer prioritises by talking to production first. The decision sequence Ibnu uses across a typical shift breaks down into three steps:

• Check with production: Ask the production team which line they need restarted first.
• Apply the quick-win rule: If one fix takes five minutes and the other takes 30, get the quick win running first.
• Escalate if both are major: If neither breakdown has a clear quick path, escalate to the manager for prioritisation.

“It comes down to communication with the production department to prioritise which one they need us to attend first,” Ibnu explains. “With experience, we can often judge it ourselves. This one could be fixed in five minutes, the other could take 30 minutes, so we get the quick win running first. But if both are major breakdowns, we escalate and find the priorities from the manager.”

Why Short Shelf Life Raises the Cost of FMCG Manufacturing Downtime

Short shelf life raises the cost of FMCG manufacturing downtime because lost production cannot simply be recovered later. In many sectors, a missed hour can be made up. In FMCG, the clock is far less forgiving.

“One thing that is challenging about the food industry is the life of the product,” Ibnu says. “You have an expiry, so it is not like your stock went down in the warehouse and you just produce more. We have to produce based on the expiry of the product, and it is a really tight window. If you lose one production run on a Monday, it is really hard for planning to work around it. So that stress comes down to engineering when we have a breakdown.”

That pressure is exactly why so many FMCG manufacturers are trying to move from reactive repairs to planned, preventive maintenance.

The Friday Planning Meeting That Brought FMCG Maintenance Under Control

A weekly planning meeting brought FMCG maintenance under control at Gosh! Food. For years, Ibnu’s team worked the way many maintenance teams still do, reacting to failures as they happened.

“Back in the day we were mostly firefighting,” he recalls. “The machine breaks, we go and fix it, another one breaks, we go and fix it. We did not get the chance to schedule everything into the planning.”

That changed when engineering earned a seat at the weekly planning table, alongside operations, production, quality assurance (QA), and hygiene. Ibnu now sends the upcoming week’s scheduled maintenance work in advance, and the team integrates it into the production plan so engineering gets allocated slots.

The benefit is not only fewer surprises. It is a sense of control. “We get a bit more relaxed time, and we get the feeling that we are more in control when it comes to maintenance.”

Shifting an FMCG Plant From Reactive to Planned Maintenance

Shifting an FMCG plant from reactive to planned maintenance starts with the data, not the schedule. The work order data captured in the team’s CMMS turns one-off breakdowns into patterns the team can plan around.

At Gosh! Food, the shift has been measurable:

Reducing reactive work is now a formal KPI. “It is one of the key performance indicators (KPIs) that has been given to us since the beginning of 2025. We have been trying to track it, and we are getting better at it.”

The CMMS makes the progress visible at machine level. “It shows us which machines we are working on more on the reactive side, which ones are more reliable, and which ones are less reliable.”

Maintaining a Mix of Older and Newer FMCG Production Lines

Maintaining a mix of older and newer FMCG production lines means adjusting the preventive approach to each asset’s age. Gosh! Food runs a spread of equipment ages, and Ibnu adapts accordingly.

His rule of thumb is simple:

1. Lines under five years old: Follow the manufacturer’s maintenance manual and schedule those activities directly in the CMMS.
2. Older lines: Use the work order history to spot recurring failures (e.g. a belt or bearing failing every two months) and add those replacements to the schedule on a fixed interval, regardless of condition.

“It is preventive, so it does not cause us unplanned downtime,” Ibnu explains. Those recurring tasks are scheduled automatically, which keeps planned work order management ticking over without manual chasing.

What an FMCG Manufacturer Needs From a CMMS

What an FMCG manufacturer needs from a CMMS starts at the bottom of the maintenance pyramid, not the top. Ibnu frames the decision around what he calls the maintenance pyramid, a hierarchy of capabilities every engineering team should hit in order.

The base of the pyramid covers the non-negotiable foundations:

• Work order management
• Work order history
• Data reporting
• Asset register
• Planned preventive maintenance (PPM) scheduling

The second step adds the reliability and inventory layer:

• Spare parts management
• Mean time to repair (MTTR) tracking
• Mean time between failures (MTBF) tracking

“That is the minimum for any company to start with,” Ibnu says. “Anyone from production can raise a work order, and on the preventive side you can structure a planned preventive maintenance schedule.”

According to Ibnu, current CMMS tools fall short for FMCG manufacturing in two specific areas: mobility for shift engineers, and accuracy on reliability metrics.

The first gap is mobility. “Every engineer has a shift phone, but they have to come back to a computer in the office to do all their shift reports,” Ibnu says. “A mobile version would let them raise a job there and then, and close it off right after the work, so they do not miss any data.”

Mobile access is increasingly standard, and it is one of the features worth checking when comparing CMMS options for FMCG manufacturing.

The second gap is reliability metric accuracy. “The current software is not that precise when it comes to MTTR and MTBF. Those are calculated based on the hours the equipment was in production, and the CMMS does not know that unless we put it in, or it defaults to 24 hours. That does not give you realistic data, so I download it into Excel at the end of the year and work it out manually.”

The production data sits in a separate monitoring system, and bridging the two is still a manual job. “I have to take data from a few sources and compile it into one. Maybe in the future they will be able to integrate it, but who knows.”

Error-Proofing the Date Coding Line in FMCG Manufacturing

Error-proofing the date coding line is one improvement project that shows how Ibnu thinks about FMCG reliability. The problem was that a single human error on date coding could cost an entire batch.

“We run a lot of variants, and the life of every product is different. With the existing date printers, operators had to pick the product and the use-by date manually,” he explains. “You do not get a uniform skill level across every shift. If someone is absent and another steps up, they might pick the wrong program, run half a batch with the wrong date, and that is a lot of rework. We tried training, but we cannot get uniform skill levels across the whole factory.”

The fix removed the human variable altogether. A new inkjet printer pulls the date programme automatically from the barcode on each product. The operator scans the barcode before production, the printer loads the use-by date and confirms with a product image, and the human decision is taken out of the loop. Ibnu describes it as poka-yoke, the lean manufacturing principle of error-proofing.

The new system paid off twice over:

• Eliminated date coding errors: No more wrong-date batches and no more rework.
• Cut consumable use by 60%: The new solvent cleans itself, removing the need for separate cleaning solution.
• Reduced shutdown time: A smart shutdown mode runs cleaning automatically when production stops.

Using Fishbone Analysis to Escape FMCG Firefighting

Fishbone analysis is how Ibnu’s team escapes recurring FMCG firefighting. When a fault keeps returning, the structured root-cause method beats engineering instinct.

“Every engineer who has worked on a line for a few years can usually find the root cause easily. But there are always some issues where you are scratching your head,” he says. “You get it five times a year, you think you have fixed it, and it comes up again. If it causes a big majority of your downtime, that is when you really want to drill deeper and fix it once and for all.”

The method works by separating possible causes into three categories:

• Machine: Lack of maintenance, worn components, design weaknesses.
• Materials: Wrong lubricant, wrong type of film, off-spec inputs.
• People: Lack of skills, wrong operator on the wrong line, inadequate training coverage.

The CMMS tells the team which faults are worth that level of attention. “We have had issues with our ovens where the motors were failing quite frequently, so we use the CMMS to find out how often the same issue is happening,” Ibnu says. “Every quarter you can get a whiteboard, draw a fishbone, brainstorm the causes, and put the corrective action into your scheduled maintenance. If that issue had been happening every two months, and afterwards it became five months, then you know it had an effect.”

The Last Word on FMCG Manufacturing Maintenance: Make Time Before Firefighting Starts

Ibnu’s closing message returns to the reality every FMCG manufacturing engineer lives with. Maintenance is a support function, and that is precisely why discipline matters.

“You are never the primary function, you are always there to support production. In a fast-paced environment, even a small amount of downtime creates a bigger problem,” he reflects. “So most of the time engineers fix the symptoms just to get the line going, and they are not able to go back and fix the root cause. That is where firefighting comes in, and once you get into it, it is really hard to come back to planned maintenance. Everyone has to find a way to plan some time, go through your historic data, find the main issues, and find the root cause. In the long run, it helps a lot.”