Maintenance Today, Savings Tomorrow
Any maintenance, whether scheduled or unpredicted, could end up being costly.
That’s why it’s always important to consistently keep a routine check on your current system. This idea of preventive maintenance helps companies cut costs in the long run, keep their equipment in good shape, and most importantly keep employees safe.
And some of the best ways to keep your machines healthy and safe are often very simple. These simple solutions can fall into different categories of preventive maintenance.
What are the Different Types of Preventive Maintenance?
First, before taking preventive action, it might be helpful to understand what kind of preventive maintenance is being done. By understanding the different types, it may give a better idea of what has already been checked, or even what’s left to review.
The different types of preventive maintenance are:
- Time-based maintenance:
Bases repairs on a fixed schedule. This is usually determined by manufacturer’s recommendations and can change depending on equipment condition.
- Predictive maintenance:
Uses forecasting tools, past data, and analytics to estimate the next repair.
- Condition-based maintenance:
Uses tools to monitor the current operating status and recognize patterns that could indicate failure.
- Usage-based maintenance:
Bases its repair cycle on a predetermined figure that has already been decided. For example, a car needs new oil every 5000-7000 miles.
Ways to Keep your Machines Healthy and Running
As previously mentioned, the ways to keep your equipment running at its best are often very easy.
Some ways to administer preventive maintenance are:
- Creating a daily, weekly, or monthly checklist
- Fix small issues as they appear
- Cleaning after use
- Using recommended solutions to lubricate the unit
Is Preventive Maintenance Really That Important?
Although preventive maintenance may cause some additional steps and procedures in your daily agenda, it’s always important to keep a check on your tools. By doing so, not only will you be saving yourself time in the future, but also your employees.
To show you the importance of this, here are some quick facts about preventive maintenance:
- 21% of downtime is caused by machine failure.
- 30-40% reduction in downtime with preventive maintenance.
- Up to 60% of failures are preventable with proactive maintenance.
As you can see, so much time can be saved by fixing errors that are preventable. By not actively pursuing a preventive maintenance plan, more unnecessary problems could arise. For example, OSHA states that manufacturing industry workers are at an increased risk of serious injury compared to other industries. Using preventive maintenance, this increased risk can be lowered to give employees the safest environment possible.
How can Russell Conveyor Help?
At Russell Conveyor and Equipment, we hold reliability and safety as a top priority when it comes to building our product. We use new technology to not only improve performance, but lower energy costs. To help with your preventive maintenance needs, we offer inspections of your current system to give you the most accurate forecast for future repairs. Lastly, we offer a full line of spare parts to help keep you on time and your company running. Whatever it is that you need, we’ve got the parts for it!
To learn more about our offerings, follow this link to see our product listing.
For more information on how to save energy and reduce labor costs, check out this blog about reducing energy loss with regenerative drives.
To see one of our other blogs about proven conveyor safety, read this blog post.
Are you ready to have confidence in your machinery? Request a quote today when you call (336) 526-3014.
FAQs about Preventive Maintenance
Do you have any hot button questions after reading about Preventive Maintenance? Below, we’ve answered some of the most common questions we receive:
It all depends on the type of equipment, recommendations made by manufacturer, and working conditions of the machine. But generally, it’s best to have a set time frame (a week, month, year, etc).
Preventive may follow a predetermined schedule, while predictive uses data and forecasting to set repairs.
Absolutely. When you identify minor problems before they need repair, it can save you the hassle of fixing a massive machine failure.
Some things to look out for include belt condition, alignment, tension, worn parts, and lubrication of moving parts.
Yes. Even though it may not seem major, fixing small issues as they occur is much better than cleaning up a failed piece of equipment.