Business

How to reduce Maintenance Costs?

An organisation that aspires to stay ahead of the competition and rule the market, must know how to keep a strong watch on the operating cost and focus on increasing profits. Most companies still consider maintenance activity as a costly affair; however, they fail to understand the importance of maintenance activity with regards to profits.

While most maintenance managers agree that reducing the cost of maintenance is not easy, they also agree that with the help of effective software, maintenance activities can be streamlined, and expenses can be minimised, they are apprehensive about adapting the technology due to added cost of implementation and training. Therefore, most of the time they try to make adjustments in the existing maintenance strategy, while helps them save a few bucks but fail to show significant results.

According to recent research, 50% of companies still depend on reactive maintenance as a part of their core maintenance planning. Reactive maintenance can be a small part of our entire maintenance strategy, but it cannot be the core of our planning.

What is Reactive Maintenance?

Reactive maintenance also termed as corrective maintenance refers to the repair activity performed on a piece of equipment after it has stopped functioning. This strategy might prove beneficial for a short term but in the long run, it can result in huge losses.

How can companies save on maintenance cost?

While there are many ways to reduce maintenance costs, the most effective method is by switching from the reactive strategy to the preventive maintenance method. To streamline and automate maintenance activities companies have adapted the CMMS or the Computerised Maintenance Management system software. This software schedules maintenance activities as per the asset important and its usage, thus ensuring that every asset is checked and maintained such that they never result in breakdowns.

Reactive maintenance comes with a plethora of disadvantages, and preventive maintenance can convert these disadvantages into opportunities, let’s see how preventive maintenance can solve the problems created due to the reactive strategy.

1. Expensive in nature

With reactive maintenance, the cost of running the maintenance unit becomes a costly affair in the future. Unexpected breakdown of the equipment’s during production hours leads to the loss of work hours, delay in productivity, inferior quality productivity and mostly it results in losing customer trust.

With so much at stake, reactive maintenance will prove to be expensive for the company. Therefore, companies must switch from the reactive strategy to the preventive maintenance strategy.

2. Poor Asset performance

Due to the lack of periodic maintenance, the assets lose their efficiency and fail to function optimally. Most of the time, the maintenance supervisors fail to even recover the investment made on the asset, due to lack of maintenance. With preventive maintenance, assets go through periodic servicing, which improves their efficiency and their life span.

3. Breaks the Work Flow

The entire workflow gets disturbed when a piece of machinery suddenly stops functioning during production. The production planning for the day goes waste and the delivery of the work orders also gets delayed, which results in overall time or delayed work order fulfilment.

4. More energy consumption

Normal activities like greasing, lubricating or simply cleaning can increase the life span of a machine. Machines in good shape tend to use 20% less energy than the sick machines. Therefore, with preventive maintenance, assets get the attention and care they require resulting in better asset health and performance.

The Final Word:

Preventive Maintenance also is known as Predictive maintenance has proved to be a boon for companies globally. It helps to control operating cost by giving full control over every asset working within the unit. With an effective maintenance schedule, the cost of maintenance can be minimized, and the overall efficiency of the assets can be maximized.

So, adopt the right software and run your maintenance unit through the power of automation.

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