The machines your company owns are important business assets, but if you want your machinery to hold its value, it needs regular maintenance.
Routine maintenance includes regularly performing standard checks. What does that involve? Parts that are worn or damaged could need to be repaired or replaced, specific parts could need realigning, and much more. Basically, routine maintenance can prevent your machinery from failing. It can also help your company to meet production schedules and lower the risk of workplace accidents.
Let’s take a closer look at why routine maintenance is so essential.
Routine Maintenance Ensures a Longer Life for Your Machinery
As with any type of equipment, the more you take care of your machinery, the longer it will last– the more it will hold its value, too.
When asset-intensive companies use a computerized maintenance management system to digitally plan, track, measure, and optimize all routine maintenance, they can ensure maintenance activities always run on schedule. In turn, the machinery will last longer.
Routine Maintenance Helps to Prevent Accidents
Your business assets are worth little when your company’s reputation is damaged.
No organization wants workers to face health and safety risks. But if routine maintenance isn’t performed, there is an increased risk of a worker being involved with an accident due to defective equipment. If your company is liable for an employee injury that could have been prevented via simple machine maintenance, your business’s reputation could become ruined.
A Lack of Routine Maintenance Can Cause Machine Failure
If your facility should experience catastrophic machine failure, it will throw off your entire operations. That can have a devastating impact on your productivity and profits. But catastrophic machine failure can be avoided with simple scheduled maintenance.
Furthermore, as long as you stagger machinery maintenance correctly, you can ensure there is no unwanted downtime that will affect your scheduled production. Also, if your machinery should experience a catastrophic failure, it could be costly or even impossible to repair; in which case, you’ve just lost a major business asset.
Types of Maintenance to Perform
Machine maintenance affects every mechanical asset and every employee who uses the machinery, so you need to have an excellent maintenance strategy in place. That involves knowing which maintenance operations to conduct and when to perform them.
Routine maintenance involves basic maintenance tasks like checking, testing, and replacing parts on an ongoing basis.
Other types of maintenance to regularly perform include:
- Preventive maintenance, which involves identifying potential problems and taking steps to solve them before an issue occurs.
- Corrective maintenance, which involves tasks that get mechanical assets back into full working order, such as realigning parts during routine inspections.
- Condition-based maintenance, which involves monitoring the condition of machines and performing maintenance tasks when there is evidence of a decrease in performance.
- Predictive maintenance, which is similar to condition-based maintenance in that it enables problems to be identified before machine failure happens. Predictive maintenance uses tools and sensors to track a machine’s performance in real-time.
- Prescriptive maintenance, which uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the maintenance process further. Sensors track the performance of machines to let you know what maintenance work needs to be completed and when it needs to be done.
Summing Up
By implementing a routine maintenance strategy and incorporating other maintenance methods, you can ensure your mechanical assets remain in excellent condition for years to come. That means the machinery will hold its second-hand market value and you can save significant expenses in your everyday operations.
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