Maintaining business assets is essential to preserving their functions, avoiding unplanned downtime and prolonging their usable lifespan.
Of course the maintenance process itself can be challenging and disruptive to complete. To help you out, here are some tips on the top ways to streamline routine maintenance duties and make them less of a chore.
Embrace digital management tools
The great thing about maintenance in the digital age is that you do not need to rely on older, manual techniques to stay on top of your responsibilities.
With the assistance of a computerized maintenance management system, otherwise known as a CMMS, you can do everything from set out an achievable maintenance schedule to automating alerts for when issues arise.
The latest CMMS packages allow you to reduce the costs of maintenance while increasing the efficiency, and also give you excellent, actionable insights into your past performance so that you can make improvements to processes and policies going forward.
Consider how maintenance is coordinated
Maintaining your assets should help you to sidestep outages and issues further down the line, but this is not ideal if the maintenance work itself gets in the way of the day to day operations of your organization.
This is why you should not just push ahead and set out a schedule for routine tasks without coordinating this with other departments.
For example, if you work in manufacturing and the maintenance work will mean that lines will need to grind to a halt for a set period, it makes sense to time this in such a way that it does not derail the carefully-planned initiatives that others have put in place.
Likewise if your maintenance is related to IT resources, coordinating this well in advance will ensure that mission-critical systems and apps are not left inaccessible at inopportune moments.
Look into spare part & material requirements
This is another key aspect of any routine maintenance plan. Even if your work is sensibly scheduled, it might fall flat if technicians do not have the components and the materials they need to bring vital assets back to optimal working order.
As you might expect, by looking at your past usage of spare parts, you can make precise predictions about future needs. Thus you can order appropriately and avoid over or under provisioning, while also keeping your budget in check.
Factor in third party involvement
For lots of businesses, maintaining assets is not something that can be achieved solely with in-house talent. If you only need to maintain and repair equipment, IT systems and software at irregular intervals, outsourcing this can be cost-effective and convenient.
When planning out routine maintenance, make sure to take any contractor requirements onboard. This is necessary to ensure that they are booked in advance while they still have availability, and that you know what other needs they might have when they are on-site.
Be rigorous with documentation
Business assets may have their own specific processes and practices to follow when it comes to maintenance. However, you will typically need to come up with a schedule and set of procedures which are tailored to your business specifically.
This means that you cannot afford to drop the ball when it comes to documentation. The more thoroughly you set down what needs to be done, who is responsible for doing it and what this will mean for the rest of the organization, the easier it will be to follow through successfully.
With experience, conducting routine maintenance will be less taxing, but it is always worth putting in the extra effort to realize benefits further down the line.
