Preventive maintenance is seen as an overhead cost by most organizations and is usually not a top priority until an issue is critical to the point it affects operations.
In Kenya, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, 2007 makes provision for organizations to ensure machinery is in the best condition and to protect employees against harm when operating them.
Though not prioritized in most organizations as an important productivity item, asset and machinery maintenance is a growth driver that ensures businesses operate at a maximum capacity to drive output and consequently the bottom line for all organizations.
Below are some reasons why you should probably prioritize asset and machinery maintenance in your organization.
THE BENEFITS OF ASSET AND MACHINERY MAINTENANCE
Why should a business invest in regular assets and machinery and asset maintenance? Below we discuss a few important benefits
- Extension of asset lifetime: Regular maintenance creates optimum efficiencies which prolong the lifespan of machinery
- Increase safety and reduced risk of injury: Safety is one of the key occupational priorities in most organizations and ensuring machinery operators are safe starts by ensuring the machinery is operating at optimum.
- Less expensive corrective repairs: Keeping a regular asset and machinery maintenance schedule ensures that significant damages which could be costly are caught in time or avoided. This ensures the organization is not exposed to expensive corrective repairs that occur due to ignored regular maintenance.
- Less downtime: Downtimes can significantly affect an organization’s revenue or ability to meet its goals as it creates a vacuum where an organization is not producing, hence unable to meet its customers’ demands. By keeping a regular machinery maintenance schedule an organization can reduce adverse downtimes that could affect its bottom line.
HOW TO CONDUCT ASSET AND MACHINERY MAINTENANCE?
But how do you create systems within your organization to ensure regular asset and machinery maintenance schedules? Below is a 3-step plan forward-thinking organizations use to ensure maintenance is systemized within their organizations and a deliverable and not an afterthought.
Choose a few critical assets
Come up with a list of critical assets that would require regular maintenance. This is best executed by creating a priority list based on downtimes that would cause the most significant impact on an organization’s bottom line.
If a possible downtime due to maintenance malfunction can expose the organization to significant losses in revenue or affect the service level agreements they hold with their partners, then that qualifies as a critical asset in the maintenance hierarchy.
Make a preventative maintenance checklist
With critical assets established the following circle is specifying things that will require maintenance within the asset clusters. This is meant to ensure the maintenance is elaborate and covers all the key functional points to avoid spending too many resources and specific asset clusters.
Addressing each asset maintenance cluster with finality ensures the service circles per asset cluster as not too regular because only a service segment was addressed.
Schedule maintenance
Finally, you are at liberty to set dates on when specific maintenance of asset clusters will be done. This ensures continuity of operations and the organization can plan better. Especially around major maintenance activities which might affect operations.
CONCLUSION
Organizations which slack about the adoption of proper maintenance standards usually end up delivering sub-standard products or causing inefficiencies that lead to significant loss of revenue.
A systemized maintenance schedule ensures organizations can produce and deliver quality to their customers and ensures the production capacity lasts longer.
The initial capital invested in machinery capacity is significant and the best way to ensure that an organization can reap the rewards of such investments is by ensuring they can last longer through regular maintenance.
Does your organization prioritize regular mechanical maintenance? Let us know how we can help here.