Once you acquire equipment for your business, it’s important to keep the equipment properly maintained. Otherwise, the equipment will fail prematurely, leading to unexpected capital expenditures. In the midst of running a successful business, though, proper maintenance practices can be easy to overlook. However, if you follow the right steps, you’ll be able to make it an integral part of your normal business operations.
Although taking care of your company’s equipment during use is everyone’s job, properly maintaining the equipment should be the responsibility of only a few individuals. By specifically designating people to be in charge of maintaining your company’s equipment, you will ensure that it doesn’t get overlooked by employees with other responsibilities. Plus, by designating specific individuals to take care of maintenance, these individuals can increase their skills to make maintenance practices even more effective.
One important aspect of equipment maintenance is replacing worn-out parts as necessary. In order to streamline this process, though, it’s important that there are spare parts on-hand at all times. Additionally, it’s vital that you have an organized record of what parts, such as forklift parts, conveyor parts, and parts for other essential equipment that you have on hand so that you don’t order too many parts, thus wasting company money.
When it comes to equipment maintenance, it’s difficult for maintenance personnel to complete jobs if they don’t know what needs to be done. That’s why a maintenance checklist is a must-have item as part of a successful equipment maintenance operation. The checklist should list how often the maintenance needs to be performed, what types of supplies are needed to perform the maintenance, and include a block to allow the individual performing the maintenance to list the date that the maintenance was completed.
Even with efficient maintenance practices in place, it’s still possible that some maintenance items could be missed throughout the year. Therefore, to ensure your equipment doesn’t suffer, it’s a good idea to perform an annual review of the completed maintenance from the last year to see if anything has been missed. If you notice any gaps, you can determine whether to ignore the missed maintenance or if catch-up maintenance needs to be performed.
After you’ve had your equipment maintenance procedures in place for a while, you will start to learn more about the equipment being maintained. This will let you know whether additional maintenance needs to be performed or if the amount of maintenance being done is about right. This will help make efficient use of your employees’ time and ensure that your equipment has a long and productive life.
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