General plant equipment ranges from small parts like ball bearings and motors, to large systems such as size-reduction equipment, compressors, and air-handling systems, plus heaters, humidity control systems, hydraulics, turbines, vacuum coolers—and  many more.

While all of this is typically ancillary to actual processing and packaging equipment, your plant won’t function without it. This equipment also handles steam, water, and utilities—and provides systems for wiring, filtering, and cooling, as well as water and wastewater treatment.

In this section, you’ll even find flooring and flooring equipment, exhaust fans, filter equipment and supplies, HTST systems, hoses and hose equipment, inspection systems, metal lockers, O rings, piping and tubing, and many more items.

If you’re looking for individual replacement parts—e.g., belts, bearings, and blades—you’ll find several manufacturers who can supply OEM or identical replacements. If you’re not sure if a part you found will work in your equipment, suppliers stand ready to help you with the details.

You’ll find that much of plant equipment today—excluding, of course, small replacement parts—will have built-in controls, sensors, and/or automation, and therefore will often integrate into plant-wide automation systems.

Plant equipment today (e.g., grinders, cookers, slicers, etc.) will often feature as much automation as process and packaging equipment. Therefore, even if you don’t integrate it into a plant-wide automation system, you’ll often be able to interface it into the same displays you use for your automation systems—making it convenient to monitor all systems from the same screen or screens. In addition, be sure to ask about predictive maintenance (PdM) capabilities, as many of these systems will feature PdM and AI-based systems to let you know when a part needs to be replaced  on your schedule, rather than when the machine breaks down. In fact, many parts manufacturers—such as SKF—can provide monitoring equipment that you can check directly, or the parts provider will do the monitoring to let you know, for example, when a motor or conveyor bearing needs replacing.

So if you’re replacing equipment and machines today, be sure to check out what digital PdM and IIoT capabilities are available, as automated and intelligent maintenance can keep you up and running, letting you do maintenance when you want to—not when the machine decides to fail.