If you are selling hot or cold food, you will need a maintenance programme for your food service equipment. Not having a good programme in place inevitably costs your business with a range of negative consequences.
These include:
Most onsite maintenance schedules will include the common equipment checks pictured below.
To counter these challenges your staff or visiting service technicians will have their hands full both doing the work and recording the servicing completed for each freezer, cooler, or warmer operating on your premises.
This is where AoFrio’s IoT ecosystem can help you to keep a more complete record of the work and a change log for the controls in each asset, capturing data over time to track their performance, and presenting it for your team so they can make informed decisions about where to put their efforts.
Tools designed to give your team flexibility and insight?
AoFrio’s Field software is a mobile-friendly application that gives your team secure access to information about each asset in real-time including previous service visits, parameter adjustments such as lighting, fan and condensor use, as well as alarm and temperature tracking.
By connection to AoFrio’s SCS controller, your team can use Field app to adjust settings to improve performance as well as checking previous service entries and tracking the asset’s improved performance – or otherwise – based on changes made in previous servicing.
When also synched with AoFrio’s Monitor, you can use Field app to track individual activities within your asset such as door openings, compressor run state, light level changes, and physical movement.
Service technicians can log symptoms and actions taken against the asset for future reference (See logging screen pictured). They can also adjust key parameter and temperature settings to respond to the issues commonly caused by environmental changes, general wear-and-tear, and the build-up of dust, moisture, food spills, bacteria, and other undesirable elements from food products that collect over time.
These results can all be used instore through automatic Bluetooth synching to assist servicing but can also be seen remotely and compared with other assets in your fleet via connection to the Cloud through AoFrio’s Network Pro communication hub. This enables more prognostic service planning and analysis of where assets are at the end of life or need a full refit. That’s the beauty of introducing AoFrio’s well-rounded IoT ecosystem as part your maintenance schedule.
Keeping food safe and ready for sale
With temperature-sensitive items like milk and meat products, real-time monitoring and automated alarm settings are especially important. Field app can help you track and adjust temperatures within each asset to have an appropriate range for the food types stored inside, as well as setting up alarms to appropriate threshholds.
AoFrio also offers standby modes through its SCS controller that reflect the opening hours of your business and settings for the use of more specialised equipment such as night curtains on an open deck chiller, and timed defrosts to prevent ice and moisture buildup that can harm both the asset and the merchandise. This helps reduce your energy costs and means you can power down assets for more thorough ‘unplugged’ or ‘offline’ cleansing without losing their normal operating settings or history.
Better outcomes with more detail
When introduced as part of a regular servicing programme, AoFrio’s Field app and connected ecosystem of monitors and controllers provide invaluable detail that backs up the other work keeping your asset clean and ready to perform.
When left unmonitored, any one of these elements can lead to equipment failure and loss of inventory. With close monitoring, the ability to check back on changes, alarms and regular checkpoints with reliable data, you are far less likely to see unpredicted equipment failure and all those negative impacts that cost you and your customers.