5 Steps For Staying Up-To-Date On Equipment Maintenance
The time you spend managing equipment, identifying unexpected problems, and repairing broken parts costs time, money, and other resources. Equipment failures due to overdue maintenance and inadequately performed preventive maintenance lead to reduced reliability, safety hazards, and unusable equipment.
By not maintaining your equipment, you risk:
- Increased time spent searching for missing parts and information
- Additional overtime with decreased productivity
- Under or overutilization of maintenance staff
- Excessive part replacement from insufficient preventative care
Here are some steps to take to stay up-to-date on your equipment maintenance and avoid unexpected equipment downtime.
Step 1: An Ounce of Prevention
Establish a preventative maintenance program that keeps your technicians accountable and your equipment in top performance.
Each member of your team may be aware of required maintenance tasks, but if they lack proper skills, many of these duties will never get done, at least not on time.
A skills gap can leave you with a never-ending backlog of maintenance tasks that, when left unattended, dips into other work productivity and unexpected downtime.
Get Your Team and Equipment On Board
Procrastination leads to neglected equipment. Functional equipment increases productivity. When equipment is operating correctly, instill in your technicians the benefits of up-to-date maintenance. For instance, properly maintained equipment reduces busy work and unplanned corrective work.
Critical work should come first, so consider ranking your equipment. Start by listing each based on its maintenance schedule and prone to failure. Then prioritize work based on your goals and the necessity of the equipment– work needed immediately, work that can be done at any time, and work that’s planned but not ready to start.
Step 2: Train Your Technicians
e of the three most common causes of equipment failure is operator error. Untrained workers can also cause legal action or hefty fines. That’s why Step 1 involves changing your technician’s mentality to ensure they understand the importance of equipment maintenance, leading to the next step. You can better protect your equipment by ensuring every individual operator is adequately certified and/or trained. Start a training and development program centered on equipment maintenance and record training document digitally in a cloud-based platform.
Read more: Asset Use Tracking that Goes Beyond RFID
Make the information easily accessible to your technicians, including from their mobile devices. Also, keep a record of your operators’ certificates and activate a notification program to let you know when the certs are approaching expiration.
Step 3: Schedule Updates And Upgrades
Schedule upgrades for equipment susceptible to failure. You know from experience that outdated equipment is more prone to breakdowns, but new equipment unexpectedly breakdown too.
Find a solution that helps track equipment performance throughout its life cycle and then include the date of purchase, the recommended maintenance and upgrades provided by the manufacturer, as well as planned inspection timeframes.
Include the expected failure dates with prior notifications to ensure you replace or repair the equipment before they fail. Avoid using equipment that is well past their intended run times.
Step 4: Work On Accountability
True leaders hold themselves and their teams accountable, so be sure to encourage every operator to verify equipment status. The best way is through mobile inspections, where technicians can select whether equipment passes the assessments.
Such a system should also allow operators to indicate the probability of failure so that the maintenance team can immediately take corrective or preventive measures. Create failure codes to make it easier for every technician to identify the cause of equipment downtime after inspection, thus, making task assignments easy.
Also, plan for condition-based maintenance where technicians can monitor and update elements inside the machines.
Step 5: Track Everything
Measuring your progress once your plan is in motion will help you identify the systems that work, those that need improvement or change, and those that are not useful. For instance, you might realize that having inspectors and technicians is redundant and instead train and empower your inspectors to repair or update your machines.
New challenges you might not have considered might come up that you need to address. Data collected through your cloud-based solutions and technician experience will also prove valuable during your performance assessment. Stay connected to your team members and get involved by helping them tackle challenging tasks. Track the use of available resources and determine whether more is needed to aid maintenance tasks.
Prevent Equipment Downtime with Anytime Assets
It’s time to move from reactive equipment maintenance to a more proactive and preventative maintenance culture. Work on planning maintenance and then ensure everyone is accountable for specified tasks. Also, optimize your maintenance systems by getting the right equipment maintenance software.
Anytime Assets helps you monitor and review equipment and asset-related information remotely. Providing customized solutions specific to your industry that help your business grow, Anytime Assets is an integrated and secure Cloud-Based environment that brings real-time asset information assets made available at your fingertips.
Do things like:
Export Information in Anytime Assets
Asset Identification using Images
Customized Fields in Anytime Assets
Anytime Assets can provide you with an assets management system that is efficient, intelligent, and secure. Contact Anytime Assets for complete details.
FAQs
Why is equipment maintenance essential?
Inspecting and taking corrective measures before an equipment failure ensures your operations work efficiently to reduce downtime, thus, maintaining your productivity and keeping your team and organization safe. It also prevents additional repair and downtown costs.
What steps should you take to ensure your equipment maintenance is up to date?
Start by setting the right goals and priorities for preventing equipment failure, create a schedule for updating your equipment, take an inventory of your resources and start to train your technicians, practice accountability, and ensure you track every stage of the process.
Are there different types of maintenance?
Yes. Primarily, these are corrective, preventive, risk-based, and condition-based maintenance.