Preventative maintenance, or planned maintenance, is the process of making sure that equipment is operating at peak efficiency at all times. In the short term, this means minor problems can be detected and solved before they become a major problem. And in the long term, preventative maintenance helps you get the most from your equipment for longer.
Think about your car. Most people don’t wait until it breaks down before getting it serviced. Instead, you book it in for a service every 12,000 miles or so. The same approach should apply to the equipment you rely on to generate your income and yet, some companies wait until their equipment fails before doing anything about it.
On the surface, you might think that breakdown repair has the edge. After all, you only need to budget for the one-time expense of repair and parts, right? Wrong. The cost of breakdown repair extends far beyond the repair labour and materials. Because a breakdown is never planned, it causes production to stop for an undetermined period. For every minute that production stops, the company is losing money. It may miss deadlines, which impacts the rest of the supply chain and can increase the risk of losing customers. It’s no surprise then that the true cost of a machine breakdown has been estimated as between 5 to 15 times the preventative maintenance costs.
It’s not only the downtime that costs the business; if equipment starts to wear without detection, you may be producing items with unacceptable quality without realising it. Before long, this will erode customer and consumer trust in your products and brand.
By maintaining your equipment on a regular basis, you are also ensuring you get the most out of it. Because it’s working more efficiently, you ultimately benefit from a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a stronger return on investment (ROI) in the long run.