Traditionally, equipment or facilities are only maintained when they malfunction or break down. However, this approach to asset management can often be too little, too late, as the damage has already been done by the time the problem is identified. Your business may therefore suffer from lost productivity, unexpected repair costs, and extended downtime. A better approach is preventive maintenance.
What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is an asset management strategy where assets are routinely inspected and serviced to avoid potential problems or failures. Some examples of preventive maintenance activities for enterprise facilities and equipment include:
- Cleaning and lubricating machinery
- Inspecting electrical wiring and components
- Testing safety equipment
- Weatherproofing and routine repairs
- Replacing worn parts
- Upgrading asset components
With scheduled tune-ups, companies significantly increase the life span of assets and improve their performance.
Why is Preventive Maintenance Important?
Your business stands to gain a lot when you correctly deploy preventive maintenance.
Avoid Major Repairs
Rather than waiting for issues to occur, you can conduct preventive maintenance tasks, such as routine inspections, cleaning, and tune-ups. This significantly reduces the risk of asset failures, cutting significant costs associated with emergency repairs.
Optimise Asset Performance
Preventive maintenance extends your assets’ life span and keeps them running at peak efficiency. Assets perform better when they’re regularly serviced. For instance, cleaning HVAC units can prevent dust buildup that causes poor indoor air quality and ventilation. Regular lubrication of moving parts can also reduce wear and tear, allowing HVAC units to more effectively regulate temperature throughout the space.
Increase Predictability of Work Scheduling
Preventive maintenance makes work schedules predictable. Rather than waiting for an asset to fail and creating emergency work orders, you can schedule preventive maintenance tasks in advance. This makes it easier to plan weekly workloads and prevents potential scheduling conflicts.
In fact, if you have an asset management system, you can automatically create work orders based on service histories, usage patterns, or whatever schedule you define. This takes the guesswork out of asset management and ensures that your team is always on the same page.
Additionally, budgeting for preventive maintenance is much easier since you can spread the cost of servicing over the life span of an asset. This is in contrast to the cost of emergency repairs, which are often incurred suddenly and can be much more expensive.
Increase Site Safety
When companies maintain assets only after issues occur, you can miss issues that may cause accidents and injuries, putting your workers at risk. Fortunately, routine asset audits and preventive measures can promote better health and safety for inhabitants and field technicians.
Conducting preventive maintenance with asset management software will also give your team relevant safe work method statements for specific jobs. These statements can be formatted into checklists, which technicians can use to ensure that routine inspections and tune-ups are performed safely.
Reduce Maintenance Costs
With reactive maintenance, your company can incur massive costs from various sources. For starters, if there’s an emergency repair work order, you’ll likely have to pay premium rates for rush orders on replacement parts and compensation for specialised technicians. If the asset isn’t operational, your business also suffers from decreased productivity and loss of potential revenue. Poor maintenance also increases health and safety risks, which in turn, lead to serious injuries and expensive lawsuits.
In contrast, preventive maintenance is far more cost-effective. While regularly scheduled work orders may seem like a significant expense, they actually save your business money in the long run. Routine maintenance jobs are also much more straightforward than major repairs and hardly take any time at all. This means you won’t have to pay overtime rates or deal with significant operational disruptions.
With proven asset management tools like WorkBuddy, you can streamline every aspect of your preventive maintenance programme. From creating work orders to scheduling tasks and tracking progress, WorkBuddy makes it easy to keep your assets in top condition. Book a demo today to learn how our software can help you create an effective preventive maintenance programme..
