Maintenance Tips, MUFES & Training

Welcome to The Maintenance Issue! We hope you find it useful, and we think maybe a lot of you will use parts of it in your store-level training materials.

We have 14 categories here—some are fresh updates of stories we’ve run over the past few years, and others are brand new. To assemble the information, as you’ll see, we’ve gone to the people who are most knowledgeable and most <i>objective<i/> about what actually goes on out there in the field—the service agents.

Service agents, in our opinion, very often are the linchpins that hold the industry together, from the equipment factory’s assembly line all the way to the finished food arriving out in the dining room. They’re the ones who get the call when something’s not working. They’re the first ones to see patterns and build the data. They know how competing models of equipment are similar and different. They can see how different menus and different operations get different results from their equipment.

Like Santa Claus, they know when operators have been bad or good.

So we thank them. We simply couldn’t put this issue together without them. In addition, especially for the new-from-scratch stories, we thank the Commercial Food Equipment Service Association. As you go through the stories, you’ll see specific service agents interviewed, and in some stories, at the end you’ll see a thank you to CFESA for suggesting contacts.

Those of you who know CFESA know it’s an energetic group, very pro-education and pro-training. CFESA puts on educational conferences twice a year with heaping helpings of business technology and education and training topics in addition to marketing and business-management sessions. CFESA has created a number of certification programs over the years, which means CFESA knew right away who could be helpful to us for these stories.

And while we’re on the topic of education, get yourself off dead center and sign up right away for our own Multiunit Foodservice Equipment Symposium for commercial operators, to be held Jan. 28-30, 2012, at the Barton Creek Resort & Spa in Austin, Texas. You’ve probably seen the MUFES ’12 ads—including one in this issue—and some of you have probably had some email or phone contact with us about it.

Time’s a tickin’. You need to get yourself signed up! We have a great program lined up again, very nuts-and-boltsy, as always. We don’t do broad-brush theoreticals. We’re more training-oriented in the sense that you walk away not just with overview but with very specific things you can implement right away. Numbers. Measurements. How do to it. If you know someone who’s attended before, ask that person about it.

For MUFES ’12, we have a session on recent LED advances, how to apply them, plus how to source LEDs, what the new standards are, and how to plan for a retrofit project.

We have a session on water filtration for cold-side applications, and another for hot-side equipment. We have a top-notch panel discussing facility modeling for LEED, from lab data to field metering and more.

Plus several other hot topics, including brand new data on ice-machine performance that’s never been seen before. And did we mention an international session?

So sign up. Keep gathering new information and new insights. We hope to see you soon. For more information, check out fermag.com/event-calendar/mufes.html and/or email us or give us a call.

Happy Holidays!

Brian Ward

Chief Editor “””