For many businesses, maintenance is far more important than it seems. At a distance, maintenance may seem like a bit of an annoying chore, and one that isn’t directly related to your productive output. But realistically, better maintenance habits can help you save time, save money, and ultimately keep your business running smoothly.
Knowing that, it pays to improve your maintenance habits. But what are the most important principles for doing this?
The Value of Improved Maintenance Systems
Improving your maintenance systems can help your business in many ways, including:
- Cost savings. For starters, better maintenance can save you money. Typically, maintenance allows you to prevent issues, rather than dealing with them when they arise, and the issues you deal with are usually smaller and less expensive, because you’ll be able to catch them early. In total, you’ll spend less money on maintenance and repairs, and you’ll have fewer costly incidents to deal with.
- Equipment reliability. This also improves your equipment reliability. With proactive, consistent maintenance, you can make sure that your equipment is up and running as often as possible. This can greatly improve your productivity and output across the board.
- Equipment longevity. In line with this, superior maintenance makes your equipment last longer. You’ll get more value out of every investment that you make for your business, and you’ll have fewer replacements to worry about along the way.
- Safety improvements. In many applications, better maintenance habits can make your organization safer as well. When equipment works more reliably, it becomes less prone to potentially devastating accidents.
- Productivity and efficiency. Also, assuming you already have maintenance practices in place, improving those practices can streamline productivity and efficiency in this area. You’ll spend less time on maintenance overall if you have more thoroughly documented, efficient practices.
Understand Your Equipment
The first and arguably most important principle for better maintenance habits is to understand your equipment. Maintenance for an air compressor, for example, is very different from maintenance for a commercial delivery truck. You won’t be able to conduct effective maintenance on your equipment unless you truly understand how that equipment works.
You can start by reviewing all the documentation for each piece of equipment you purchase, and making sure you have dedicated engineers, mechanics, or other experts who have a thorough understanding of those internal components.
Focus on Proactive, Not Reactive Strategies
Next, you need to focus on proactive strategies, rather than reactive ones whenever possible. Essentially, that means focusing on preventing issues rather than dealing with them when they arise. Keeping a consistent schedule, catching issues as early as possible, and working on equipment even when it seems perfectly functional can all help with this.
Appoint Key Leaders
Maintenance is easier to keep consistent if you have strong leaders in place. A good leader can design the perfect maintenance strategy and oversee it to make sure it’s executed properly. Leaders are also important for education, training, and guidance, which is especially valuable if you have a large team of people who practice maintenance for your organization. Choose your leaders wisely.
Document the Process
It’s important to have a formal process in place for your maintenance. Your engineers and mechanics may know what they’re doing, but even small discrepancies in performance can lead to drastically different outcomes. On top of that, maintaining formal documentation for your processes gives you something to systematically review and improve, so you can keep increasing your productivity and efficiency. Get these documents created, make them publicly available, and review them regularly.
Provide Education and Training
Don’t assume that every employee in your maintenance department knows everything they need to know to be an effective associate. Instead, provide them with direct education and training, and perhaps even mentoring or coaching as they develop their skills. The more you invest in them, the more valuable they’ll become as assets to your organization.
Be Consistent
Across all your teams and individuals, strive for consistency. Consistent processes are typically more efficient and less prone to error, and they make it much easier for you to track down flaws if and when they arise. Identify inconsistencies and deviations from your standard processes so you can address them appropriately.
Automate Anything You Can
It’s hard to overstate just how impactful automation can be in your business. Automation saves time, streamlines efficiency, and reduces the possibility of mistakes. Try to automate any maintenance processes you can, even if it’s just automatically alerting employees when it’s time to practice routine maintenance.
With these principles in place, you can improve your approach to maintenance in your organization. In turn, better maintenance is going to you in saving time, saving money, improving equipment longevity, and even making your environment safer.
