Your physical assets, such as your equipment and machinery, are the backbone of your business. However, equipment failures cannot be eliminated — they will happen. Fortunately, implementing preventive maintenance measures can help you maintain these assets and extend their lifespans. In today’s blog, we’ll discover the top five benefits of preventive maintenance. But first, let’s briefly get into what preventive maintenance is.
What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance (PM), also known as preventative maintenance, is the proactive maintenance of physical assets to reduce the chances of equipment failure and unplanned machine downtime. For instance, this includes regularly and routinely cleaning, lubricating, inspecting, and replacing equipment parts and machinery. Put simply, preventive maintenance is about fixing small problems before they become big ones. This is important because it lays the foundation for effective facility management. By proactively maintaining your physical assets, this keeps them running efficiently, improves safety levels for your employees, and helps you avoid large and unnecessary costly repairs down the road. Remember, it’s better to prevent issues than react to them.
5 Top Benefits of Preventive Maintenance
Many companies follow the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra, but counting on deferred maintenance leaves your facility vulnerable to added costs, lost productivity, and health and safety risks. By performing routine preventive maintenance, this ensures that your facility runs efficiently and offers you peace of mind. Here are five top benefits of preventive maintenance:
1. Extends asset lifespans
Arguably, one of the most important benefits of preventive maintenance is the lengthened lifespan of assets. Equipment and machinery are bound to break down and fail eventually. But, by proactively scheduling maintenance and inspections, this ensures that these assets achieve their full lifecycle, and possibly even exceed its projected life expectancy.
2. Improves workplace safety
In facilities like manufacturing plants and factories that have dangerous equipment and machinery, health and safety is considered as a primary concern. Luckily, by effectively tracking preventive maintenance with a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), this will allow you to oversee all the assets in your facility and store important safety information in one central hub. What’s more, using CMMS software also simplifies safety audits. In other words, you can quickly access complete maintenance history and safety protocols for all assets just with a few clicks on your smartphone. As a result, the more often assets are checked, and the more protocols are followed, the less likely dangerous problems will occur.
3. Reduces unplanned downtime
Equipment downtime, whether planned or unplanned is inevitable, when maintenance is being performed. However, unplanned downtime is one of the worst things that can happen to a business. It causes costly delays in maintenance, production schedules and order deliveries. Additionally, it increases the chance of employee injury, environmental incidents, and emergency repairs. That’s why for operational managers, this might be one of the most significant benefits of preventive maintenance: the reduction of unplanned downtime. Unplanned downtime can be significantly reduced by scheduling maintenance in advance with a preventive maintenance plan. When preventive maintenance is performed, you have the chance to schedule the task at a convenient time for you and your facility. In essence, it can be scheduled when employees are out of the building or when operations are done for the day. Consequently, this minimizes disruptions in production and efficiency.
4. Increases productivity
A well organized labour force is a more productive one. In fact, according to a report by Deloitte, poor maintenance strategies can reduce an organization’s production capacity by 20 percent. By leveraging modern preventive maintenance solutions such as a CMMS software, this allows operational managers to:
- — Digitize essential equipment details
- — Assign recurring work orders
- — Review asset history from the convenience of their smartphones or tablets.
5. Reduces maintenance costs
Equipment downtime caused by reactive maintenance results in costly repairs. This is because emergency reactive maintenance:
- — Requires the cost of rushed shipping on necessary machinery parts
- — Compensation for specialized technicians
- — Lost sales in revenue or productivity while the asset isn’t operating
Even worse, without any preventive maintenance measures in place, this could require a full asset replacement. As a result, causing costs to sky rocket. Therefore, preventive maintenance increases savings by enabling companies to anticipate repairs needed in the near future. The upfront costs of performing preventive maintenance may seem alarming at first. This is especially true if your facility is operating under a tight budget. But, you have to remember that maintaining your assets is an investment in your company’s future.
