Organizations continue to invest in the tools to help them perform routine maintenance to improve equipment performance, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. In order to keep equipment running at peak performance and avoid unwanted breakdowns, it is important to perform routine maintenance to improve equipment reliability. It is essential to have a maintenance management tool, like CMMS software, to help you schedule and manage your preventive maintenance and monitoring performance. The following are some important tips to improve preventive maintenance:
1. Establishing Maintenance Standards
Not setting standard preventive maintenance procedures and schedules, or performance measurements, the equipment could quickly break down. Repairs may cost you more money than ongoing preventive maintenance and can cause a big disruption in business operations.
Establish appropriate frequencies for your scheduled maintenance to help optimize equipment performance, reliability, and longevity. Since every organization’s maintenance requirements are unique, you must develop preventive maintenance procedures that works for your organization.
2. Failure to Track PM Information
Omitting key information in your PM program can lead to a major disaster. Not tracking all of the important information on all of your equipment gives you a limited understanding of your equipment’s performance. Keeping track of the percentage of completed PM tasks, the number of breakdowns occurring, or the number of times you’ve had to repair specific equipment is valuable information for improving your preventive maintenance program.
3. No Preventive Maintenance Checklists
Forgetting to do specific maintenance tasks can result in significant downtime. Creating checklists and attaching them to work orders ensures that all of the tasks have been completed to the required specifications. For those tasks that could result in steps that are dangerous to omit, you should also capture the signatures of the responsible person.
4. Eliminating Equipment From Your PM Program
Ignoring equipment that is at other locations or does not seem to be important enough at the time you are setting up your PM program can have a major impact on your business. PM should be scheduled for all equipment, and also all support and infrastructure assets. Not including facilities support equipment in your PM program can lead to downtime and major business disruptions.
5. Instructions Not Clearly Defined
Working in a reactive mode may result in instructions being left out or not being clearly defined. PM tasks should clearly explain and contain as much detail as possible. Such as what condition the equipment is in, what issues they need to look for, and what they should do if they find the equipment in unsatisfactory condition. Ensuring that they have access to any historic repair information, manuals, drawings, or any additional information will speed up the repair process.
6. Purchasing Spare Parts Before They Are Needed
Having spare parts sitting on shelves for a long time, and not having the right spare parts in inventory can be costing you a lot of money. For proper inventory management, you need to set up a schedule to review all spare parts and create a classification such as critical and non-critical. The classification you set up today can change at any time. Review repair history and identify those spare parts that are hard to find or very expensive, so that you can have the proper spare parts on hand when you really need them. Get rid of parts that are no longer going to be used, because you no longer have the equipment, they are just taking up good inventory space.
7. Poor Employee Communications
One of the major issues with maintenance management is getting your team involved, accepting, and encouraging the less enthusiastic team members. Having a preventative maintenance plan in place is the first step in running the facility more efficiently, minimizing downtime, and reducing maintenance costs. What good is a preventive maintenance plan if your team is not fully aware of the plan and trained to carry out the procedures and tasks to make the plan successful?
Whether it’s training staff on using new technology to track the scheduled repairs or training them on what, when, and how something needs to be done – properly informed and trained staff will ensure your preventive maintenance program is successful?
8. Not Tracking the Efficiency of your PM Program
Ignoring the effectiveness of the PM program is a road to disaster. In order to get a full understanding of whether you’re preventive maintenance program is meeting or falling short of expectations, you must measure it.
Proper tracking of your PM program improves Return On Investment (ROI).
At eWorkOrders, we know how important preventative maintenance is to businesses in all industries. This is why we have been rated an industry leader in CMMS software that meets the needs and exceeds customer expectations. We work closely with our customers and understand the challenges that PMs are encountering, and we want to help them to avoid making the most common preventive mistakes and improve maintenance operations.
