Unexpected equipment breakdowns can be expensive, disrupting production and cutting profits. Sometimes these issues can be avoided by reviewing repair records to identify trends or patterns in repairs that should be conducted more regularly.

Effective maintenance management ensures minimal disruptions, reduces downtime and extends equipment lifespan while simultaneously lowering costs and keeping staff productive. Here are a few maintenance management advice tips that could help your organization: 1. Establish and Maintain a Work Order Process.

1. Don’t Micromanage

Micromanaging often stems from fear. While managers should keep tabs on employee performance, knowing when it is appropriate to step back and trust their team is just as essential.

Monitoring every little aspect of employee work can be exhausting and extremely frustrating, eventually leading to managers burning out and no longer caring about their job or even quitting altogether; leaving your business open to future problems as time and money slip away.

Example: A manager reporting daily on everyone’s work would find it nearly impossible to recognize equipment issues before being informed. This could lead to wasted resources as costly repairs are performed on equipment that would have been better protected with preventive maintenance.

Investing in technology that allows you to automate some processes will allow your managers to focus their attention on other areas of the company, reduce human error when collecting data and eliminate paper reports. It will also eliminate paper waste while simultaneously eliminating needless reports.

2. Schedule Preventive Inspections Ahead of Time

As part of any maintenance management strategy, it is vital to create and use a checklist of preventive inspections to ensure no items slip through the cracks. Keeping this list can ensure they only undertake maintenance that is truly necessary and avoid unnecessary work.

As part of creating a preventive maintenance schedule, it is crucial that you select an appropriate frequency for each task. Some equipment requires daily inspection while other may only need inspection weekly or monthly based on previous work history. Therefore, having a data collection program such as CMMS software in place allows for informed guesses about when each asset and equipment requires attention based on historical work history.

Preventive maintenance will not only minimize downtime, but it’ll also save money by helping avoid costly repairs from reactive plans. It is much cheaper to adjust misalignments in belt alignment than to rebuild broken motors; hence its essentiality for business success. If an air compressor stops functioning improperly or a conveyor belt malfunctions, this will likely lead to massive production loss; with proper preventive maintenance practices in place this issue can be avoided entirely – for more advice regarding effective preventive maintenance practices for your business contact a facility management industry advisor today for advice.

3. Give Your Technicians Autonomy

Maintenance teams are essential components of any facility and as such must be treated with dignity. One way to keep a maintenance team happy and productive is giving them more autonomy.

Allow maintenance technicians to carry out smaller, straightforward tasks, such as lubricating equipment, cleaning machinery, and making adjustments, thus freeing them up for more important responsibilities while also avoiding an “us-versus-them” mentality between machine operators and maintenance technicians.

So long as they adhere to established maintenance standards, more experienced members of your staff should be capable of handling basic tasks on their own, freeing up senior technicians to focus on more technical duties while cutting labor costs as a result of eliminating additional personnel hires.

To aid this effort, it is vital that maintenance employees receive the appropriate tools for their tasks. Expecting them to use standard screwdrivers when trying to tighten a 12-inch bolt might be overkill; providing battery-powered drivers could make the task simpler and faster. Furthermore, make sure all work performed by your team is recorded in a CMMS; not only will this provide a record of what was and wasn’t accomplished; it can also be used as an opportunity to spot trends and patterns within your maintenance program and thus further refine it over time.

4. Be On the Lookout for New Ways to Solve Old Problems

No matter what approach your business uses to manage maintenance – be it software, best practices or simply written notes – it is vitally important that it continually seeks ways to enhance. Don’t settle for “good enough,” especially with equipment that has such an enormous effect on the bottom line.

One effective strategy for this is the use of a maintenance management dashboard. This tool allows managers to monitor what their team members are doing live while also recognizing areas for potential improvement.

Your maintenance employees need access to tools necessary for completion. For example, if they spend hours trying to tighten a bolt with a manual screwdriver, upgrading to a battery-powered model could save them both time and energy, allowing them to complete other tasks more promptly.

Establish a system for collecting and analyzing data. This will allow for timely changes instead of waiting until an issue arises to make changes. Furthermore, keeping up-to-date with emerging technology that could assist your technicians do their jobs better is also key; such as Augmented Reality Goggles that enable maintenance teams to easily identify problems quickly through annotations displayed on machine parts.