Manufacturing organizations need a periodic and regular schedule to repair assets and equipment. This is vital as it helps to keep the equipment in good working condition. As a result, organizations can avoid costly and unscheduled downtime due to unexpected equipment breakdowns.
To position a company for long-term success, prioritize and establish a clear, defined, and well-thought-out maintenance plan. This is significant in this era, where over 80% of companies experienced an unexpected outage in the last three years.
To be one step ahead of the problem it’s essential to plan and schedule your unit’s preventive maintenance.
Preventive maintenance is becoming the center of most organizations today. Dedicated industrial maintenance management is much needed, considering the difficulty of executing preventive maintenance schedules for several machines and processes.
This article gives a detailed definition of preventive maintenance, and it benefits businesses. Ultimately, you will understand how it helps your business stay ahead of problems as they develop.
What Is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance denotes the routine maintenance tasks targeted at safeguarding your equipment and the steps you take to foresee accidents and equipment failures. It includes tasks like executing routine business and equipment inspections. Moreover, you also need to clean and lubricate crucial equipment and maintain the grounds of your company.
Such reliability maintenance tasks lower the risk of accidents by preventing equipment failure well in advance.
As a company, you are always exposed to some risks related to your staff’s and clients’ safety. Additionally, your equipment’s operation and safety and your property’s maintenance are always at risk.
That is why taking specific procedures to minimize the risks to your company’s assets and workforce is vital. Reliability maintenance can help you ensure the safety of assets, the safety of your employees, consistency in production, and reduced repair costs since the problems are identified at their initial stages. Thus, you and your staff get to concentrate on enhancing what’s effective rather than staying busy fixing broken parts and delayed schedules.
Preventive maintenance is not reactive, but instead proactive. Now let’s explore how preventive maintenance can benefit your business.
5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Preventive Maintenance
1. To Increase the Longevity of an Asset
Extending the lifespan of an asset is the most significant advantage of preventive maintenance. Undoubtedly regular equipment maintenance schedule will enable it to run longer, reducing costs.
One of the most common KPIs you can leverage in your organization is the mean time between failures. Most managers use this formula to guide them into making knowledgeable maintenance decisions.
Therefore, keeping track of data like MTBF helps you to stay ahead of the problems. It becomes easier to schedule preventive maintenance at the correct time. As a result, it will help you catch the equipment before it breaks down.
And with an effective solid downtime tracking routine, you will attest to the prolonged equipment lifespans.
2. To Reduce the Risks of Breakdowns
Preventive maintenance is vital when it comes to lowering the risk of breakdowns. Breakdowns due to missed maintenance management can be detrimental to your business. You stand to suffer from missed production and a bad reputation due to putting off maintenance.
Preventative maintenance can help avoid most mechanical breakdowns in industrial equipment. According to an insurance report, 62% of equipment breakdown was due to missed maintenance.
Therefore, as a facility manager, it’s essential to reduce the chances of equipment failure. Ensure you encourage timely and proactive maintenance scheduling, which will provide you peace of mind at the end of the day.
3. To Achieve Equipment Reliability and Reduced Downtime
Undoubtedly there is no way your company can avoid machine downtime during maintenance. This is regardless of whether you use a reactive or preventive maintenance plan.
But the truth is you can minimize downtime interruptions by a great margin when you schedule your plant maintenance.
When unforeseen breakdowns occur, there are so many things at stake that can prolong your wait time. Because it’s unplanned, you will have to book an appointment or wait to deliver the required parts, increasing the machine’s downtime.
That’s why it’s important to carry out a preventative plant maintenance schedule instead of a reactive one.
With pre-planned plant maintenance schedules, you have ample time to arrange the procedure at your convenient time. You can easily schedule it after a day’s activities or when workers have left the business premises. As a result, this will reduce disruptions to production and efficiency.
4. To Promote Health and Safety
Scheduling and planning maintenance can help enhance your facility’s well-being and safety.
Health and safety are vital in any facility, including business buildings and schools. But for a long time, preventive maintenance was prioritized only in facilities with dangerous equipment. This must not be the case.
Every type of business needs a reliability assessment to know how prepared it is to handle disruptions. This must be followed by planning and scheduling maintenance management to address areas that underperform or need attention.
You can leverage a computerized maintenance management system for equipment and reliability assessment. Using a system helps track plant maintenance as you keep an eye on all your facility’s equipment. Besides, the system can help you keep crucial safety data in one central location.
Installing such essential system software will come in handy whenever you need safety audits.
5. To Cut Down Costs
Apart from safety measures, well-planned and well-executed industrial maintenance can hugely contribute to financial savings.
Globally, the costs incurred due to unplanned maintenance can add up to $50 billion each year. This is because emergency reactive maintenance accounts for missed sales or productivity during downtime. In addition, you will also need to cater to the cost of expedited shipping for critical machinery parts.
But the worst scenario is when the machine shuts down entirely due to the lack of reliability maintenance. This may result in a complete equipment replacement, which would translate to exorbitant costs.
The initial investment in preventative maintenance can be frightening, especially if your facility is on a limited budget. But maintaining your equipment is a long-term investment for the success of your business.
Preventive maintenance is vital for any organization. It increases the longevity of your assets and reduces breakdown risks and downtimes, which helps to eliminate the demand for reactive maintenance resulting in financial savings. Keep in mind that the small safety precautions you’re doing today will secure your firm and make it more profitable in the long run.
