CPM|Crown has enhanced its Lifecycle360™ offerings to include plant operations, a service designed for clients seeking to enhance all facets of their operations, including the plant itself, production processes, equipment and the employees.
CPM|Crown has expanded its Lifecycle360™ offerings to include plant operations. With this addition, Lifecycle360 is now a suite of eight support services that help oilseed, renewable fuels and specialty processing companies streamline and optimize the full lifecycle of their facilities, from pre-engineering to long-term maintenance needs. The company had launched Lifecycle360™ in early 2025.
The company highlights the plant operations service as being designed for clients seeking to enhance all facets of their operations, including the plant itself, production processes, equipment and the employees. Plant operations engages Crown’s mechanical, process and automation experts to look holistically at the customer’s full facility and team and help identify bottlenecks and improvement opportunities in technologies, training and other areas that can maximize levels of efficiency, productivity and capacity.
Each plant operations consultation begins with an on-site assessment, leading to a full analysis with solution recommendations that might include equipment or one or more of the other seven Lifecycle360 support services. The objective is to help customers accomplish both quick and long-term wins for their team and business.
Lifecycle360 plant operations services include:
• Preventative maintenance plans
• Shutdown steam purge planning and support
• Debottlenecking
• Process safety management/Hazard analysis
• Operating procedures (SOPs, start-ups, shutdowns, clean outs)
• Virtual plant monitoring
• Smart operating controls improvements
• Asset integrity/reliability
• KPI metric evaluation and ROI
• Project, automation and maintenance planning for day-to-day operations
• Introduce the newest/improved innovations, parts and equipment
• Risk assessments
Kris Knudson, CPM|Crown’s President explains the origins of the plant operations service: “Through the success of our Lifecycle360 rollout, we’ve had a chance to interact with customers and take their feedback. It became apparent that we had an opportunity to do more for them through our program, so we added plant operations. Our plant ops team is a group of extremely talented individuals who have been doing their work for decades. This experience enables them to listen to the customer’s team and help uncover where they’re needing the most support, whether it be employee training or process optimization.”
According to Knudson, the Crown plant operations team acts as an extra set of eyes for the customer’s own employees: “During the assessment, we help open up more possibilities and more options that the customer may not have thought about. I know from my own experience that when you’re in the plant, you’re so focused on day-to-day operations like employee engagement and key metrics that it can be hard to see the big picture, which makes it easy to miss opportunities. Our team comes in and helps broaden that perspective. Their observations, assessment and support really help provide the final solution.”
Plant operations isn’t the final addition to the Lifecycle360 program. Knudson explains, “We’re continuing to work closely with our customers and take market feedback. We see more opportunities for other Lifecycle360 programs. In fact, we’re already working on the next releases.”
Plant operations and all other Lifecycle360 support services are now available to customers around the world. The other seven Lifecycle360 services include: Crown’s Innovation Center; pre-engineering; construction support; automation, maintenance support, training; and optimization.
