A business needs proper equipment management and care. Not only does this prolong the life of your machinery, but it also reduces the chances of accidents and promotes workforce productivity.
Have a look at some expert strategies to help reduce costs with the help of maintenance consultants.
What are Maintenance Consultants?
Maintenance management consultants are experts who evaluate your business maintenance performance based on your needs. The purpose is to ensure quality and efficacy.
When it comes to high maintenance expenses in a business, maintenance consultants can make reports to show where exactly the money is being spent. Based on the findings, they will build a strategy to help you lower your business costs.
Most business owners still think hiring an expert maintenance consultant would be a waste of money. Instead of hiring a professional, they tend to go for in-house resources, giving them the added responsibility of reporting. But it’s not helpful.
Professional maintenance consultants surely aid in keeping the business successful and productive. To extend the life of your equipment, they use preventive maintenance measures, train your workforce, effectively manage inventory, and bring maintenance costs down.
Thus, here are 6 tips on how maintenance consultants can reduce maintenance costs.
1. Be Proactive Instead of Reactive
Check-and-balance keeps machinery in good shape, known as proactive maintenance. Meanwhile, focusing on fixing machinery, once broken down, is known as reactive maintenance.
Maintenance consultant advises their workforce to follow equipment and machinery guidelines. This helps use the machinery as per need, and not over-using them. Proper use of equipment keeps it from breaking down.
On the other hand, misuse of equipment can lead to a malfunction. While most employees might not purposely misuse a piece of equipment, they might not know how to work with it. Maintenance Consultants inform them about the guidelines.
This means that if machinery is appropriately used and is not breaking down every other day, the cost of fixing it automatically reduces. This strategy is known as being proactive — to operate in a way that does not lead to any issues.
However, having reactive measures, such as not taking care of the equipment unless it’s broken down, only adds up to maintenance costs. A proactive approach is a highly efficient and effective maintenance strategy to reduce costs.
2. Prioritize Preventive Maintenance
Keeping in mind the previous strategy, preventive management follows a similar line of thought. A solid preventive maintenance strategy means taking preventive and precautionary measures to keep equipment top-notch.
It helps minimize the following:
- Unforeseen delays
- Machinery breakdowns and malfunctions
- Risks of workplace hazards.
If we have not cleared this yet, let’s do it now. Keeping your machinery in good working condition at all times is very important. This includes not allowing them to break down.
To be able to do that, maintenance consultants aid the workforce in taking preventive measures to keep the equipment running when needed. This helps keep surprise expenses at bay. If a machine is taken care of throughout, as a routine, it most likely won’t stop working suddenly.
3. Maintain Schedules
To ensure that machinery receives regular care, maintaining a schedule is essential. It shows that nothing is being missed in the maintenance process of equipment.
You can also create a checklist to see if everything is on schedule. While schedules, checklists, and maintenance activities vary from industry to industry, your checklist could have these pointers:
- When was the equipment last serviced?
- Do we know its current location?
- Has the maintenance team done their regular inspection?
- Who did the maintenance and services?
Being aware of all the details and making notes of everything also helps in analyzing your workplace. And with managed scheduling, nothing can go wrong. If it does, the maintenance team can be on it to fix the issue before it escalates.
4. Manage Inventory
Inventory management is a crucial component for any big or small business. Some equipment may require regular maintenance by changing its parts.
Big factories often replace conveyor belts from time to time. For that, they keep the spare parts for backup. However, if the maintenance team fails to inform the management that the spare parts are near empty and new products need to be shipped, this may stop the whole operation.
Your maintenance consultants build a system where you can record inventory when you need to order more, and what extra features you have that you no longer need.
Assets no longer needed can also be sold to help with other business expenses.
5. Expect Unpredictability
While preventive maintenance is excellent, some problems come unexpectedly. Especially when you start a project with extensive operations, make sure to add enough time to the process. If anything goes down unexpectedly, you would have time to fix it without expediting extra expenses.
So, before you set a production deadline, add extra hours, something we call “buffer time“, to help make up for lost time beforehand.
6. Invest in Training and a Good Workforce
One way to reduce costs is always to make better investments. Maintenance consultants are very focused on training employees to work more productively, actively, and professionally when it comes to reducing costs.
Your mechanical engineer needs to know what they are doing, and they need to be well-skilled and informed about their duties. Applying trial and error during maintenance can cost a business a lot. Training mechanics to follow the proper procedures is essential as it helps reduce downtime and costs.
The same applies to operators. They should be efficient enough to work with equipment. Moreover, since they use it daily, they should also know how to make minor adjustments and fixes without calling the mechanics. It should be least expected of them to do regular and weekly checks on their machines.
Final Words
Maintenance consultants help businesses reduce their equipment costs and aid their operations by keeping a high uptime, lower maintenance costs, and increasing the equipment’s life.
Hence, whether your business has three pieces of industrial equipment, or 300, these tips will help you either way.
