Preventive Maintenance Is Important But…
“Prevention is better than cure” is a saying that we are more or less all familiar with. But what are its implications and how does it apply to your business? Picture yourself as an owner of a business that deals with a lot of machinery. You know that as a rule of thumb, such goods depreciate with time and it is essential to ensure proper maintenance for them to maintain consistent performance.
Many are perhaps using a spreadsheet that captures your machinery service updates and with a few formulas indicates to you regarding upcoming service dates. Sounds great right? However, have you taken into consideration some of the following:
Whilst the sheet may have the information, it is easy to overlook the task when due as there are no notifications or action items triggered to work on it.
Perhaps some of those appliances/spare parts do not need preventive maintenance on a fixed cycle e.g. the items were not being utilized?
Sounds Familiar?
To better understand the mechanism of preventive maintenance, we reached out to the operations manager of a manufacturing company to get deeper insights on this matter:
“No matter what kind of industry you are in, there is always a need to take care of your equipment and spare parts. Otherwise, you’d have to incur costs from unplanned downtime and unanticipated machine breakdown. Planning and scheduling of the maintenance are of course necessary but it can also be time-consuming and costly.To make things easier for us, we opted for a software that gave us timely reminders for preventive maintenance. It was good until we realized that it wasn’t efficient enough. That software did not take into account the days when the spare parts/equipment were not used. You know that there is a maintenance cost for every machinery we work on and some of those machinery does not even need servicing that often.”
Nicholas Ryan Wong
Operations Manager
Now What?
The catch is that even though you are apprised by a lot of software to initiate preventive maintenance you end up spending more. Despite the aims to reduce your company’s cost, it actually winds up being costly by suggesting repetitive maintenance without considering exceptions and specifics to your company’s equipment or machines.
Instead, the best approach would be to take help from a field service app that can assess the need for preventive maintenance considering various factors. These can be status of usage (e.g. used/unused), or unique parameters (e.g. item A requires service every 6 months versus the customary 3 months). Such applications will benefit you in the following ways:
Take note of the number of days a machine was inactive
Perhaps your generator was not rented out from the 5th of May till the 30th of May and was not put to use at all. A field service app would take this into account and set up a preventive maintenance schedule from the date it was last used rather than the last serviced date. Having a field service app would enable you to customize frequency depending on the type of equipment they are.
Allows you to receive custom made feedback and alerts about maintenance
Not all appliances require maintenance at the same time. This way, you would have a system with records and information on when to start preventive maintenance for each of those machines. But more importantly, you will also have pro-active triggers to alert the relevant team members that something needs to be worked on.
Reduce administrative cost with the aid of automation
Without automation, everything has to be done manually. That is to say, you would have to either check through piles of paper to verify if a machine is due for service or get an expert to check and verify if a particular item needs servicing. Needless to say, assigning experts to check on your type of equipment would cost you more money and time consumed than having a one-stop solution.
With such a one-stop solution you address the automation of future preventive maintenance, notifications that are triggered to specific people, and auto-created tasks that will need to be actioned upon and completed on the due date (which otherwise will show as pending or in-progress).
Ensure the extended life of your company’s equipment
Gone will be the days of worrying about sudden technical difficulties due to equipment failure. The field service app will give you all the relevant information at the click of a button and you will not have to keep a close eye on it at all times.
Along the way, you will discover many more advantages which perhaps will be unique to your personal experience when adapting with the likes of Custella.
Sit Back And Relax!
Mr. Wong adds:
“It was about understanding what needs preventive maintenance and when. The field service application’s attention to detail really amazed us. More importantly, it kept the relevant information about all our equipment and presented us with the most optimized suggestions. Not to mention, we are still discovering new ways of optimizing our operations.”
The aforementioned points are surely enough for you to opt for a field service app. However, it does not end there; with so many features available in these applications such as updates on spare parts usage, as well as note-taking, and photo capturing, you will be able to pick and choose what you need for your day to day activities just like Mr. Wong. With an application that is meant to boost your efficiency and cut down your cost by a considerable amount, you too may be able to enjoy that return on investment from getting such software.
Get in Touch Here to Learn More
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Need a field service management system like Custella? If you’re in Malaysia, Indonesia, or the ASEAN region, drop us an email to schedule your demo: ask@custella.com.
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