When you run a facility, you know how expensive repairs get. You know how expensive replacements get. And nothing’s going to disrupt your operations and bottom line quite like an unexpected failure in critical systems like your HVAC or your plumbing.
The answer, of course, is preventative maintenance. Do a little work on an appropriate schedule, and vastly improve your performance and reduce the cost of repairs. But when your facility is full of moving parts all requiring different types of maintenance at different times, how do you keep track of it all?
What’s Right for Preventative Maintenance?
The first thing you need to do if you’re going to effectively keep track of your preventative maintenance is identify what’s actually a good candidate for preventative maintenance in the first place.
The equipment should be mission-critical — if it were to fail, it would severely impact your ability to operate the facility. It also has to be something for which regular maintenance would decrease the chance of failure.
So it makes sense to do regular maintenance on a piece of machinery in a factory production line that has less chance of failure when you ensure it’s well-lubricated — but you probably wouldn’t want to subject every light switch to a weekly inspection.
What’s the Right Schedule?
You need to figure out what schedule works for each piece of machinery. Some things respond better to preventative maintenance according to a time period, like weekly or monthly. Other equipment will require more preventative maintenance with more use. So if some piece of equipment is used seasonally, you may not want to tie yourself to a strict schedule during the time of year it’s not in use.
As your assets age, they may also need additional maintenance, so you’ll need to figure out when that’s due to come in.
And of course, whatever the ideal schedule is, you need to balance that logistically with the resources you have. If you have many pieces of equipment that require weekly maintenance, you’ll need to stagger it throughout the week so that your maintenance staff have the time to deal with it all — and likewise stagger your monthly maintenance across multiple weeks so that they don’t get hit all at once with it.
What Are You Using to Handle Tracking Your Preventative Maintenance?
With a plan in hand, you need a tool to facilitate its success. Most maintenance managers are now on-board with Computerized Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) as that solution.
Don’t tell yourself you can “make do” with an older spreadsheet or even paper-based system. The truth is it’s easier than ever to get yourself up to speed on CMMS platforms, and you can have the confidence that you’re using a tool completely tailor-made to address the problems of managing preventative maintenance.
If you’d like to know more, you should start with Maintenance Care. We’ve developed our platform to make your life easier through allowing for simple, repeatable, maintenance management all done through an online system that you can access from anywhere. Chances are you already have everything you need to get started using it right now — and our preventative maintenance and asset tracking features help facilities reduce failures and keep maintenance costs down.
Try a demo now with one of our maintenance experts. Come prepared with all your questions! We’d be happy to explain how it can make a difference to your unique situation.
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