Routine maintenance on your equipment is of paramount importance and a necessary activity. What ‘maintenance’ basically means is a set of different activities, comprising assessment, testing, measurement, modification and replacement – all carried out in the workplaces and sectors.
Moreover, with regular implemented maintenance such as generator rewinding – it will even lower the risk associated with certain workplace hazards and dangers, creating healthier and safer working conditions for employees. Insufficient or improper maintenance can result in severe and potentially life-threatening health issues or accidents.
Businesses which invest in regular maintenance can lengthen the lifespan of equipment, drastically reducing the need for emergency maintenance, and at the same time – ensuring facilities and production lines are operating more consistently and efficiently.
Read on to discover even more reasons on why routine maintenance is an activity your business should partake in on a regular basis.
What happens when you don’t do routine maintenance
The negative impact of skipping routine maintenance can be detrimental to your business, and here are some of the consequences:
- Having to reschedule entire projects
- The possibility of a project subcontracting
- Resources and productions losses
- Unexpected downtime resulting in overtime labour
- Disposing of equipment and machinery with minimal usage
- Material wastage from untouched resources
Ways to prevent maintenance shortcomings
However, just like how it is for any issue – there’s always to solve it. Keep these basic objectives in mind and carry them out when conducting your equipment maintenance program.
- Implement a few internal quality and usage standards for employees to adhere to according to the specific asset type. This ensures equipment and machinery are running in the appropriate manner and lower the chances of downtime and improper use.
- Ensure you’ve had proper consultation before your trusted engineer before proceeding with any rigorous maintenance. By doing so, you’ll be able to prepare a proper schedule for maintenance projects and decide if you require subcontracting.
- Be sure to jot down and record all these activities – be it on paper or digitally. This will help in ensuring timely disposal by tracking repair history and calculating depreciation. The best-case scenario would be to obtain an online system which instinctively updates asset records on its own.
- To ensure you fulfil day-to-day tasks within the imposed deadlines, follow your maintenance plan closely. The completion of tasks also minimises any wastage of repair resources.
Reasons for proper equipment maintenance
Boosts efficiency during operation
Without a doubt, this applies to any equipment you have – your hand-tool, machine tool, or industrial machinery; well-maintained machinery is key to efficiency. For example, the need for electric motor overhauling. It allows your engineer to get a thorough check over your equipment and identify its current condition. After which, he will be able to do the necessary servicing have its efficiency return to its best state.
Instances like dirty oil and clogged air filters will result in your equipment having to work twice as hard to attain the same results. The end-result includes operational inefficiencies that will lower performance or output, negatively impact run time, and increase costs.
Improves equipment uptime
Essentially, with well-maintained equipment – you’re also ensuring lesser breakdowns. This results in improved uptime, extra working hours for the machinery, as well as lesser repair costs – all leading to a boost in revenue.
Lowers overall costs
To expand on the previous point, the reduced operating costs include the cost of replacement, the overall cost to operate equipment, the repair of machine parts, and the cost of the initial possible lost productivity. In other words, this can result in big differences in a company’s bottom line.
Increases the lifetime of machinery
The better you maintain your equipment, the longer its usable life and value will be. The reason why this highly matters for your machinery is that when the usable life is extended, whether it be 2, 3 or 4 years – it’s the same thing as having additional revenue for the same number of extended years from the same equipment.
Maintains the value of machinery
At times when additional funds are required, and it is necessary for you to borrow money – using your machinery as the collateral for that particular loan can be useful. Especially if you’re looking to purchase or lease equipment, you can engage with a machinery finance company which specialises in asset-backed (collateral) loans, as they’ll help look into the equity of that machinery and help determine your borrowing power. Naturally, the higher the machiner value, the more equity you have, the more borrowing power you acquire.
Meanwhile, there are still many factors that determine a piece of machinery of considerable quality – from options, age, hours of service to accessories. As such, well-maintained equipment will help tremendously in your borrowing ability and even impact your financial situation positively.
Now that you understand the importance of regular maintenance – be sure you discuss with your trusted engineer and prepare a detailed, maintenance schedule to keep track of the condition of all your equipment. The same even applies when you’ve just bought new equipment, such as the installation of distribution transformer. Impose a maintenance schedule, and you’re all set.
