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Creating a calendar for preventive maintenance is an age-old industry practice that helps to keep machinery and equipment in good condition to support the activities for achieving the desired productivity. Every equipment has a maintenance schedule stipulated by the manufacturer that becomes the starting point in creating a calendar based on time and usage of equipment. Maintaining a preventive maintenance schedule manually is a cumbersome and stressful exercise which often defies the objectives due to inaccuracies and errors in the application. Instead, using some preventative and risk management tools can nor only make the task easy and save time but also eliminate human errors to ensure improved performance and safety of the equipment.
The outcome of preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance is nothing but planned maintenance of equipment that helps to avoid unplanned maintenance and improve equipment life. Although it is the responsibility of the maintenance/engineering manager to implement a preventive maintenance program, it requires the cooperation of all team members to implement it successfully. A well-properly planned preventive maintenance program has several benefits.
It saves the cost of unplanned repairs and helps to avoid downtime as the equipment is always in a running condition. Asset conservation and equipment life increase, thereby saving the cost of replacing equipment and machinery pre-maturely. Having a preventive maintenance schedule allows the economical use of maintenance workers instead of engaging in firefighting to attend breakdown and upsetting the plans of productivity by incurring overtime costs. Timely repairs help to save cost by avoiding large scale repairs that can arise if the problems are overlooked and lead to improved safety.
Increase equipment availability
Business performance hinges on productivity, which in turn depends on the availability of equipment that is critical for business operations. Preventive maintenance helps to track every equipment closely to asses the condition and attend to any potential threats detected during the inspection so that it does not hinder operations at the time of need. Equipment that is more susceptible to failure as time progresses is the ones that benefit the most from preventive maintenance as it increases the usage, which improves efficiency and boosts productivity.
Software for preventive maintenance
Using software for preventive maintenance takes care of managing the tasks of organizing, planning, tracking, as well as analyzing the maintenance jobs regularly. It enables better co-ordination of the maintenance tasks by efficient management that becomes visible in the outcome. Many types of maintenance software are available, from the simple to the sophisticated that suits all types and sizes of organizations. The basic systems primarily aid in managing work orders and work requests. At the same time, the complex solutions help in documenting and managing all aspects of maintenance operations that encompass the entire gamut from inventory management to reporting.
More and more industries are using preventive maintenance software that has become the most vital tool to improve business performance and efficiency. Besides, it serves the purpose of controlling costs by reducing labor expenses and establishes standard operating procedures for health and safety.
From record-keeping to scheduling to resource allocation, everything becomes quite simple with preventive maintenance software.