The New Year is a great time to review and make improvements for keeping your equipment in top condition. This important issue must be addressed to streamline manufacturing production for the coming months.A good Preventative Maintenance Program for your production equipment will increase production and your company’s bottom line.
What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is a simple method to ensure that you get reliable and efficient performance from the equipment within your organization. It is important to ensure that machinery does not break down when you need it most.A simple maintenance program will help you to achieve that result.
What is the goal?
The goal of preventive maintenance is to prevent any unplanned downtime due to equipment failure from equipment neglect.These breakdowns often occur at critical times when you are desperately trying to complete your most important customers order.Regularly scheduled equipment maintenance allows you to help eliminate random equipment failures.
What to include in your Preventive Maintenance Program?
You must have a method to keep track of the repairs and maintenance done on each piece of equipment.The date of each repair or maintenance procedure performed must be listed and dated to create a reference log for that specific machine.The best way to keep track of this important information is to use a computer program.There are Preventive Maintenance Programs available online.
Simple solution for tracking and scheduling preventive maintenance.
I prefer to use my Contact Management Software that I use for customer information.I make a separate database titled “Equipment”.I have a page in this database for each piece of equipment I have.Instead of listing a Company in the company field for a page, I list a piece of equipment.All contact management software allows you to add information and make notes.The notes are automatically dated or you can manually date them yourself.Most contact manager software allows you to set alarms to alert you of important events.This alarm feature can be used to plan in advance a needed maintenance item for a certain piece of equipment, such as change the oil in a gearbox, or replace a timing belt that is at the end of its useful life.Let your computer remind you of pending maintenance items when they need to be completed.
Keeping track of a machines maintenance history makes life easier.
I also use this software to make detailed notes of a problem with a machine and what corrective action was performed to correct the problem.This has saved me countless hours of troubleshooting my equipment.I may not remember the specific repairs we did to a machine that malfunctioned five years ago.If it malfunctions today with the same problem I go to the file for that piece of equipment and review the log notes.I look for the log note stating how we fixed the problem five years ago so we can apply the fix to the current problem.This information is golden when you have a piece of broken equipment that needs to be quickly repaired to meet a production deadline.
Time spent now improving or implementing your Preventive Maintenance Program will serve you well in the coming months.Do you have a Preventive Maintenance Program?