If you’re someone who has several equipments and machinery in your facility, your first priority should be to maintain them without failure and to help them perform in the best possible condition. When you’re planning a preventive maintenance plan, you should perform it on several equipment and facilities. Moreover, in case you’re a maintenance planner, you have to check whether or not the maintenance plan is actually executing the job which is required for achieving desired results.
While there are many who prevent this kind of breakdown of equipments through CMMS software, when there arise a requirement for maintain large office equipments, it gets difficult in creating such a well-proven plan. Reactive maintenance plan always dominates. If you’re looking forward to know more on the tips to follow for preventive maintenance plan, here are some that you may follow.
#1: Utilize hierarchies or categories to manage multiple equipments
Besides using your CMMS software and entering the name and code of each of your assets, you also need to set categories for them. There can be categories like Vehicles, Production, HVAC and many others. Another way out is putting them in hierarchies of equipments where you tag them as equipment A, B or C till you reach Z. This alleviates the stress of managing and also enhances the process of reporting.
#2: Combine tasks done on different equipments into a single order
There will be numerous cases where you’ll have equipments that are similar to each other and that don’t require excessive maintenance. Changing the air filters on any HVAC unit can be done every 1 month; bearings can be lubricated once in a week and so on. You may even define some maintenance task and relate it with several equipments. Then you can combine all these into a single work order and do the needful.
#3: Set an estimate of the supply requirements and spare parts
This is yet another vital thing as you, as a businessman, would never want to run short of spare supplies or parts especially when your preventive maintenance is yet to be done. While Planning report, utilize the option of checking availability of technicians and parts for future dates while work orders are still to be completed. This will allow you to ask for supply of materials way before time instead of waiting till next order limits are fulfilled.
#4: Cross-check the availability of maintenance technicians
The maintenance planning report can even be used for checking availability of the technicians for getting future dates whenever the work orders are all scheduled. You will immediately get to know when someone will be on a vacation or will become engaged in working for a different order. You have the permission of going in and making changes to this order or appointing someone else for the work.
#5: Know the difference between working hours and idle hours
You might base your decision of scheduling preventative maintenance on the equipment’s meter readings. However you should know that the equipment meters don’t differentiate between idle time and work time. Therefore, if there is a machine that remains idle for 20% of the time will probably ask for frequent maintenance. In case the idle time is something that’s predictable, it does make sense to schedule maintenance plans on bigger intervals of meter.
Therefore, if you have a company of your own and you’re worried about preventative maintenance plan for all the assets, make sure you take into account the above mentioned points so that you could properly formulate a plan for good.
