With tighter budgets and today’s economic challenges, it’s more important than ever for any business to watch their bottom line, and that includes proper maintenance of equipment. The breakdown of one piece of machinery can cripple the work flow, and a downtime for as little as a day can translate to the loss of thousands—even millions—of dollars. Preventive maintenance, therefore, can mean the success or failure of any given business.
However, scheduling preventive maintenance means little if the actual maintenance is not done properly, or at the recommended time. It’s important to have everyone on your team on the same page, working to their optimum level, in order to keep business running smoothly. But providing accountability for such maintenance can be a daunting task.
How can I make sure all employees have the specs on any given equipment? How can I make sure the maintenance is done correctly by all employees, regardless of their length of time with the company? Is there a way to send them to the site, confident that they have the necessary tools and equipment needed to perform the maintenance?
Most companies have asked these very questions, and have opted to invest in a quality CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) software, making sure the software they choose includes Preventive Maintenance Software. The advantages of this type of system are many, including:
Regular Scheduling of Necessary Preventive Maintenance
If you are responsible for ten or twenty pieces of equipment, regular preventive maintenance wouldn’t be much of a problem. But most successful companies maintain—or would like to maintain—several facilities housing thousands of pieces of equipment. The scheduling for all of this would be mind-boggling. Luckily, CMMS software is designed with this scenario in mind. Some can even balance your work load using Industry Standards and Federal Guidelines as benchmarks to insure that the work is done at the recommended standard.
Employee Management and Training
A Preventive Maintenance system will track each task done by each employee, decreasing the chance of an employee providing maintenance too soon or too late within the schedule. Also, your managers can easily adjust schedules through an employee scheduling system, insuring that a replacement is made for a worker who is sick, on vacation, or has left the company. And through web-based Preventive Maintenance Systems, your workforce will be constantly up-to-date on maintenance training and other issues. Whether they are in the office or in the field, as long as they have an Internet connection, they have the answers with them at all times, day or night.
Accurate Preventive Maintenance Records
Once the service is done, the way to guarantee future service is done correctly is proper and timely recording of preventive maintenance. A quality CMMS makes this fairly easy, and accurate records insure that proper maintenance is done at the proper time.
No matter the software, a Preventive Maintenance System can only work well if used regularly. Make sure the system you decide on takes all the issues of your specific preventive maintenance into account, and is flexible and intuitive so that it adapts as your business grows.