Machine preventative maintenance might sound like a hassle. After all, your maintenance team has enough on their plates. Why bother checking a machine if nothing’s wrong with it?
Machine Preventative Maintenance
The truth is, you won’t know that something’s wrong if you don’t check. And preventative maintenance has a number of benefits beyond minimizing breakdowns. Here are four reasons why you need to start making machine maintenance part of your regular routine.
Maximize Efficiency
Your machines go through a lot of wear and tear in the course of a day.
In the course of a week or a year, that wear and tear ads up. And if you’re not addressing it, your machines will break down.
Of course, machine preventative maintenance isn’t just about avoiding problems. It’s about making your machines work better.
When your machines are regularly checked and maintained, they perform at their peak. That makes them more valuable for you and improves the service you give to your customers.
Reduce Costs
Preventative maintenance is good for your bottom line as well as your machines.
Put it this way.
When your machines operate at peak performance, they do the job better.
When your machines don’t work, every minute of slowed production costs you money. A study of the auto industry found that one minute of downtime costs a whopping $22,000–and that was back in 2006.
You lose valuable production time. You have to pay your maintenance team to find and address the problem. If it’s a big problem, you may even need to pay them overtime. You may need to pay expedited shipping costs if you don’t have parts on hand.
If a customer is renting a machine, you’ll have to ship a new one while the old one is out of commission, plus the time that your team has to spend getting things in order when they could be focused on active sales.
The point is, when your machines are working, you save a lot of money. How much? One study from Jones Lang LaSalle found preventative maintenance saved $39 million per year over a 25-year period, for an ROI of 545%.
Improved Safety
Of course, preventative maintenance also has on-the-job benefits as well. The biggest is safety.
Grinding gears can cause a machine to break down, with disastrous consequences for on-site workers. Dulled and warped edges can cause a machine to lose its grip.
The net result? Mechanical breakdown. At best, that means an inconvenience for your workers. At worst, it means an emergency situation.
The risk isn’t worth it.
A preventative maintenance program earns you a reputation as a safe, reliable partner and employer. It helps you deliver on time and keep your workers safe in the meantime, on top of other safety measures.
Longer Life, Shorter Downtime
All told, this adds up to two things:
- Longer life of your equipment
- Shorter downtime
When your machines are in prime condition, they work more efficiently and take less strain. That means fewer breakdowns and less downtime.
In fact, the leading cause of unscheduled downtime is aging machinery.
When you’re proactive with maintenance, you can spot issues before they turn into real problems. Your machines work more efficiently and you don’t have to worry about unexpected breakdowns. It’s a win-win situation.
Mastering Machine Preventative Maintenance
Machine preventative maintenance makes all the difference between a machine that operates efficiently and a machine that’s always this side of a mechanical breakdown.
In the end, you want to do better for your customers than the baseline.