How to Identify the Best Practices in Maintenance Consulting for Your Business

Every department’s greatest desires are to reduce expenses, boost results, and achieve the organization’s goal. This is also true for the maintenance department. In fact, if you think about it, this is a logical expectation from the business aspect.

But the preventive maintenance strategies need to be well-thought-out to translate to significant savings. According to studies, an effective maintenance management can significantly reduce a company’s maintenance expenses.

But how can maintenance management achieve this? Industrial maintenance is powerful and effective especially if you schedule routine maintenance based on time triggers or usage. This is because it will help lower the possibility of unforeseen equipment breakdowns resulting in expensive emergency maintenance.

When you encounter an emergency maintenance, you will have to expedite part shipments, outsource professional services, and pay overtime fees to your employees. All these will add up quickly, resulting in an extra and unplanned cost for your facility.

Besides the financial implication, emergency maintenance may lead to missed production goals due to downtime. And this may cause industrial enterprises significant financial losses.

For the preventive maintenance to be successful, you need a practical strategy. Here are ways how you can identify best practices in maintenance consulting for your business: 

• Leverage Leadership and Policy Deployment

Examining leadership and policy deployment is vital when it comes to maintenance consulting. To achieve a world-class preventive maintenance, your organization will need strong leadership to provide guidance, attention, and assistance.

Therefore, the management must create a clear mission and vision that support the organization’s strategy and objectives.

Moreover, leaders are responsible for establishing rules and guidelines that can serve direct maintenance and the entire organization that is assisting with maintenance tasks. Once you create all these, the next step is to implement, share, and track the policies. 

Leaders are responsible for establishing a framework for maintenance to increase effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, promoting leadership is vital in reducing risk factors for employees who handle the machines. Implementing a program or formal improvement is the best way to achieve this.

Hene, the leadership team needs to assist the employees in identifying and resolving resource problems that can hinder the company’s progress. Besides, it is crucial for leaders to work with industrial maintenance consultants to ensure proper implementation. The consultants usually help in auditing or monitoring equipment maintenance. 

• Fine-Tune Asset Inventory

Preventive maintenance is the best way to maintain key asset functionality. When you hone your company’s preventative maintenance routine, you will succeed in reducing the actual cost of PM.

Did you know that machine usage habits and workplace settings can significantly impact equipment behavior over time? Yes, sometimes the manufacturer’s recommendations may differ from what’s actually needed. This is because, often, the guide doesn’t offer practical advice for achieving asset reliability.

However, consistent record-keeping will make it easy to have better chances of improving expenditure habits. It will also add the value of maintaining comprehensive asset inventories for accounting records.

Therefore, it is vital to ensure that each asset entry contains the following:

• The machine specifications or features
• Serial number, model, and make
• Location
• Unit number
• Category
• QR/Barcode

It is vital to record labor expenses, service dates, components used, and present conditions of the machines during routine maintenance. Moreover, you will also need to consider how crucial the asset is to safety and productivity. Observing and implementing all these can get you ahead in maintenance consulting for your business. The secret is to ensure you have a fine-tuned asset inventory. 

• Establish Asset Hierarchy When Seeking Maintenance Consulting

Including all the company’s assets in the initial stages of industrial maintenance programs can take time and effort. Therefore, you need to establish asset hierarchy to address this challenge. This is essential as it will help you to be realistic.

Establishing asset hierarchy is vital as you leverage a logical index of each essential machine and component. This is significant as it shows how different machine operations impact one another.

Also, this is essential as it can aid industrial maintenance consultants in tracking the equipment efficiently, scheduling industrial maintenance effectively, and helping pinpoint the source of problems.

So, establishing asset prioritization can help your organization consider the significance of PM on each piece of equipment. For instance, you should prioritize preventive maintenance on the following:

• Equipment that has significant influence on the output
• Equipment that is expensive to maintain
• Equipment that needs frequent repair
• Equipment that can be volatile and presents safety risks

This practice is vital as it helps you progressively add new assets to maintenance consultant programs. Moreover, this makes sense when you see how plant maintenance contributes to your return on investment (ROI).

Moreover, some businesses find it practical to conduct a criticality analysis during the initial planning phase of preventive maintenance. This is usually the case as it aids in pinpointing precisely how specific asset failures affect business objectives.

Establishing an industrial maintenance strategy is an excellent way for managers to prioritize the maintenance jobs that are most critical to both safety and production. 

• Planning and Scheduling of Preventive Maintenance

Another effective strategy that you can leverage to determine preventive maintenance is the use of planning and scheduling. A schedule helps to specify the number of times maintenance tasks should be carried out on a specific machine.

This is essential as it can help your organization to work on a day and time where the maintenance won’t interfere with production when creating your PM schedule. Here are two metrics on which you can base your industrial maintenance schedule:

• Time: One of the most effective ways to plan your preventive maintenance tasks is deciding on the time. Therefore, it will be more cost-effective and practical to conduct plant maintenance after a predetermined time. A good example is your manufacturing machine, and it is best to schedule maintenance after every three months. This is vital as it will ensure that the machine is in good shape to prevent emergency breakdowns. 
• Usage: This is another metric you can leverage when planning for preventive maintenance schedules. This is effective because in usage, you are using operational hours and production cycles. The only thing you need to consider is to achieve specific benchmarks to conduct maintenance tasks. If you have a fleet of trucks, you can have them maintained after every 1,000 miles instead of quarterly.

However, you need to understand that work orders typically determine PM scheduling. But what is a work order? This is a document that describes a maintenance task in detail. Moreover, it lays out the necessary steps to perform plant maintenance.

For the work order to be complete, it needs to include crucial information like:

• Who approved the work orders?
• Who’s the maintenance technician assigned to the order?
• What’s the projected schedule for completion?
• What’s the expected extent of the work?
• What’s expected after industrial maintenance?

Additionally, work orders are essential because aside from tracking asset maintenance histories, they help you organize, allocate, prioritize, track, and finish maintenance chores. 

Final Thoughts

Identifying the best maintenance consulting strategy is vital in every business. Lack of proper maintenance may affect work timelines and expenses, which can lead to subpar results. Therefore, you need to establish a strong leadership, fine-tune asset inventory and asset prioritization, and plan and schedule maintenance. Lack of effective maintenance strategies can put your company behind your competitors.

When you have strong maintenance practices, you can be sure that you meet all the proactive activities for your business. This is because it takes persistence, leadership commitments, dedication, and willingness to implement well-thought-out practices and actions to improve the processes.

But to be sure that maintenance consulting is effective, you need to prove that it helps the rest of the business achieve its goals and objectives.