Designed specifically to perform routine maintenance tasks at pre-established times to prevent equipment failure, enhance the safety and performance of your machinery, and lengthen equipment life.
However, putting together a preventative maintenance schedule requires a multitude of effort and knowledge to be poured into the planning process – such as tracking data manually to decide when servicing should be performed, as well as factoring in different types of repairs such as transformer and generator rewinding.
Hence, it is understandable why it can be difficult to plan an effectively planned maintenance schedule. However, you can eliminate the possibility of errors in your preventative maintenance schedule by knowing which factors lead to poorly planned maintenance.
The importance of preventative maintenance
But just before we look into the various factors of ineffective planned maintenance, we will list down the importance of conducting this form of maintenance schedule for your business:
- Lower time-wastage: Unlike breakdowns, planned preventative maintenance only requires a short period of time; also factoring in the nuisance resulted and proposing the ideal time. Also, it consumes less time compared to emergency replacements and repairs.
- Conserve assets: Better management of equipment leads to improved lifespan, hence; an increase in profit and lower costs.
- Machine and operator safety: Regular preventative maintenance ensures both equipment and operator will always be able to run the machine under safe circumstances.
- Improve reliability: Customers want to rely on a business when it comes to efficiency in delivering materials, products or services promptly without any unnecessary delays. Hence, planned maintenance lowers the chances of equipment breakdowns, revenue loss, and negative impact on the production line.
What leads to ineffective preventative maintenance
More downtime for staff
When a piece of equipment breaks down, and a particular employee who is in charge of that machine is unable to work as per usual, it’ll end up impacting the workflow negative and reduce the number of products which have to be made. One major reason for downtime is unplanned maintenance done. This causes them to be left with not much work to do and will lead to lower work productivity and affect employee morale.
As such, it is necessary to call in a trusted, experienced engineer for maintenance such as electric motor overhauling, switchgear maintenance, and transformer winding. Have all such maintenances added to the planned maintenance schedule, so employees are able to maintain work productivity and efficiency.
Poor safety performance
Your employees’ safety is always key – hence, the need for ensuring your equipment is always at their best state of health. Moreover, workplace accidents will start increasing whenever the number of equipment breakdowns goes up. In other words, this may call for a need to implement an improved preventative schedule for the wellbeing of employees.
With a detailed, accurate, and effective planned maintenance schedule – you’ll be able to attain the best performance out of both your equipment and employee. Therefore, discuss carefully with a professional engineer for the ideal planned maintenance plan.
Frequent equipment faults and breakdowns
It is widely known that the purpose of prescheduled maintenance is for preparing ahead of possibly malfunctioning equipment, to detect the primary problem before the issue occurs while lengthening the lifespan of the equipment. Typically, you will see that equipment manufacturers have already suggested specific maintenance for every separate type of equipment they’ve created and it’s best to follow them closely to avoid any breakdowns.
However, while it may be the best approach, certain equipment may require extra repairs or replacements as compared to others, and this means a more aggressive maintenance schedule has to be created. Or, once you find that a piece of equipment requires maintenance even after routine maintenance; you may have to consider conducting an audit to discover which equipment will need more care and attention.
No control over the budget
Initially, you may have only wanted to spend a fixed amount of money on a piece of particular equipment. However, the cost of installing – whether it’s the installation of distribution transformer or generator – isn’t the only expense to consider when considering the budget.
In fact, repairs are extremely crucial but can get expensive when they’re unexpected. As such, a planned maintenance schedule will help plenty in maintaining your budget.
When you understand what the areas to focus on to ensure a better, elevated planned maintenance schedule is – it’ll help in improving business operations greatly.
