Does your facility have a lot of equipment? If yes, then you must ensure that they are managed properly so that they operate optimally. However, it will be daunting if you want to manage the equipment and schedule preventive maintenance manually. This is where preventive maintenance software comes into place.
This software ensures that preventive maintenance doesn’t get delayed or completely missed sometimes. Regardless of how much equipment you have, this software will manage and schedule preventive maintenance for all the machinery and tools effectively. You can further improve preventive maintenance planning using the following tips.
Effective Preventive Maintenance Planning Tips
If you have facility maintenance software, use the following tips to plan preventive maintenance better:
- Categorize Equipment and Use Hierarchies for Easy Management
Don’t just enter the equipment assets in the CMMS software. Instead, categorize them at the same time. Some examples of categories include productions, HVAC, vehicles, etc. Try to put them in equipment hierarchies too. This will make it easier for you to report and manage the equipment. Moreover, it will also become easier for you to create plans for different equipment at the same time.
- Combine Tasks Done on Several Types of Equipment
You will have similar equipment that will need some simple maintenance tasks done, for example changing air filters of all HVAC units once a month or lubricating bearings every 7 days. Define all such maintenance tasks and associate them with multiple equipment. After that, you can create a single work order with all the equipment on which this task needs to be done by scheduling the maintenance task based on a frequency you set.
- Estimate future spare parts
Having spare parts and supplies around the time of a major preventive maintenance schedule is absolutely critical. Asset management software allows you to check the availability of the spare parts for dates when the work orders are due. This report can help you identify parts that are insufficient for the required work orders in the future. If you know which parts you are falling short on, you can order them in advance from suppliers rather than waiting till re-order limits are reached.
- Check for Maintenance Technician Availability
EAM is not only useful for checking the availability of the spare parts but you can even check the availability of technicians for future dates when work orders are scheduled. You can track who is on a vacation or unavailable in the office when a preventive maintenance work order is due in the near future and make changes accordingly to the work order or assign someone else to do the work.
- Outsource Work
It’s not necessary that only your staff has to finish all the work orders. You can outsource some types of preventive maintenance work to outside contractors. This will help in minimizing stress and reduce demands on the internal staff. Moreover, it will offer you more flexibility in getting the work done. You could even save money by outsourcing your specialized maintenance tasks that would otherwise require expensive training or certification if they had to be done by the in-house staff.
- Review the Plan
It is important to review the maintenance statistics and collect the user feedback regularly. Doing this will ensure that your plan is meeting all the requirements. Based on your findings, you may have to make certain changes in the plan.
- Difference Between Work Time & Idle Time
Ideally, you must schedule the preventive maintenance based on the meter readings of equipment but the equipment generally doesn’t differentiate between work time and idle time. This means that if any machine is sitting idle for 30% of the time, it may end up having preventive maintenance scheduled more frequently that what is required. If you can predict the idle time, it may be sensible to schedule preventive maintenance based on bigger meter intervals.
Having preventive maintenance management software will be more beneficial than what you would anticipate. If you are looking for maintenance management software to help you schedule and put together a preventive maintenance plan, get in touch with us. Our NEXGEN CMMS software would be very helpful and reap in numerous benefits for your facility.
Explore similar posts.
