Today’s market demands near optimal operations, which can overextend your equipment and cause issues if you are not taking care of them appropriately.
While it may seem like taking your equipment down for maintenance may drain your budget more than if you kept it running, think again. Near zero downtime for your production equipment can become a reality with the right processes in place.
Check out these 5 ways that preventive maintenance helps to reduce unscheduled downtime and helps you operate at peak performance.
1. Keep your equipment in working order.
Routine maintenance is what allows your equipment to go farther. This is similar to routine maintenance on your car. If the oil is not changed regularly at first you may not see the repercussions right away. However, as the car ages and needs a bit more care, the effects of neglecting oil changes will compound and start to impact your car’s performance and the work required to keep it running, eventually the car will stop working before it was expected to—costing you more money in the long run.
Managing equipment and managing the asset lifecycle of this equipment is very similar. If you skip your planned preventive maintenance (PPM) work orders at first, it might not seem like that big of a deal and can even save you money, but it can significantly impact the quality and length of life of the equipment over time. Make sure you are spending the time and conducting the inspections that you need for your machinery, no matter how basic it may seem.
2. Catch problems before they become disasters.
It is easy to give a piece of equipment a once-over during a routine preventive maintenance check. Even if you are inspecting only one piece of the equipment, this close focus can help you identify developing issues well before they become full-fledged disasters that take the equipment offline.
3. Make data-driven decisions.
Once you start a regular planned preventive maintenance routine, you have access to essential data about the machine and its performance. As a result, you have data to help drive your decisions. Deciding to replace an asset requires a huge investment from the company. Using data gathered from preventive maintenance work orders can assure you when it is the right decision.
To effectively manage your equipment down to the asset level—check out our vx Maintain solution.
4. Get visibility into performance issues and their causes.
That cantankerous machine in the corner? It may seem like there is no solution to its ornery tendencies, but after a closer look, you can gather some insight into why it performs the way it does. Perhaps you need to do maintenance on it every 300 hours rather than every 500, or maybe there is a defective part that needs to be replaced.
With an established preventive maintenance program, you have the opportunity to see these performance issues and understand their causes—allowing you to fix them before they become catastrophic to your operations.
5. Reduce costs.
If nothing else motivates you to start a preventive maintenance program, do it to cut your maintenance costs. The cost of repairing broken-down equipment is up to 5 times the cost of the same repair done in a planned manner before failure. On top of that, it can significantly drive up your costs if you don’t have the part you need on hand, or if you have to take the equipment out of production for longer than expected. Preventive maintenance means money saved on emergency expenses.
Planned preventive maintenance helps to reduce costs, gain insight into your asset lifecycle, and keep your equipment running optimally.
Learn how planned preventive maintenance can reduce unscheduled downtime. Schedule your demo today!
.svg){kind=small}
