Recipe for Reliability: How Food & Beverage Manufacturers Can Transform Their Operations
Reliability is essential in food and beverage manufacturing. Do you trust your equipment to work when you need it? If not, what can you do to manage the different ingredients, or inputs, to keep your critical assets up and running?
In a recent webinar, Corey Dickens, CMRP at Brightly Software, and Grant Peagler, National Business Development Manager at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, explored how integrating asset management, automation, and energy data can strengthen operational reliability across food and beverage facilities.
Read below for a highlight of their presentation or click here to watch the full webinar on demand.
The high cost of inefficiency
Unplanned downtime remains one of the biggest threats to manufacturing performance. In the 2026 Asset Lifecycle Report, 87% of leaders said they were confident they could avoid unplanned downtime, while 85% also said they were prepared for emergency repairs. This could indicate a gap between manufacturers' confidence and the reality of dealing with unplanned disruptions.
Add to this concerns around energy waste. Large portions of industrial utility spend can often be traced back to inefficiencies that go unmeasured and unmanaged. Add human factors, such as inconsistent maintenance practices or time lost searching for parts, and reliability quickly erodes. As Dickens noted, 30 to 40 percent of a technician’s day can be spent simply locating the right part.
A centralized, mobile-ready CMMS or EAM can address these challenges by improving preventive maintenance execution, inventory visibility, energy oversight, and compliance readiness.
Turning data into action
Disconnected records and paper-based processes make it difficult for manufacturers to intervene early to prevent breakdowns, prepare for audits, or understand asset performance over time. Digitizing maintenance and compliance workflows with structured records and electronic signatures, however, can reduce manual effort and lower audit risk. But just having centralized access to data alone isn’t the answer. The goal is actionable data that drives the right work at the right time. As Dickens cautioned, efficiency suffers when teams “do things well that shouldn’t be done at all.”
True reliability starts at asset handover. Capturing installation details, documentation, recommended maintenance strategies, and spare parts information creates a system of record teams can rely on throughout the asset lifecycle.
Brightly’s Asset Essentials provides that operational foundation, enabling performance tracking, troubleshooting, and cross-team collaboration across facilities, production, warehousing, and finance. And Siemens Smart Infrastructure extends this visibility with energy monitoring, building automation systems, electrification, and IoT sensors that improve availability, reliability, and sustainability.
Final thoughts
By combining Brightly’s Asset Essentials with Siemens Smart Infrastructure solutions, food and beverage manufacturers can reduce unplanned downtime, strengthen compliance, and make smarter, data-driven decisions across every facility.
Watch the full on-demand webinar, Recipe for Reliability: How Siemens SI and Brightly Transform Food & Beverage Manufacturing, to learn more about how integrated asset, automation, and energy strategies can improve reliability at scale.
