6 Tips to Reduce Equipment maintenance costs

Equipment maintenance costs form a significant portion of overall business expenditure and can elevate your profits when managed sensibly using CMMS software. An urge to limit maintenance spending is quite common. The temporary benefit shall be counterproductive and a license for unforeseen consequences, in terms of service costs and risks, in the long run.

CMMS software helps technicians best discharge their duties by offering instant access to checklists, documents, manuals, resources, knowledge base, etc. It provides for future planning and easy work order reference at a later stage. Read on to learn the importance of digital work order management.

Maintenance costs invariably include:

• Staffing costs for internal maintenance staff or contract costs owing to delegation of work to a third party.
• The cost to bring a failed equipment back to work, including reduced productivity in the transit period.
• Consumables cost such as the cost of lubricants, tools, etc.
• Cost of spares needed for completion of service such as bearings, fittings, fasteners, etc.

Is it possible to reduce maintenance costs overnight?

Absolutely no, but it is possible to set a solid foundation by exercising control over your work orders and maintenance budget using a systematic digital approach. You can realize the tasks you were overdoing and ignoring for a long time.

How?

A maintenance automation solution lets you identify

1. business-critical equipment
2. Equipment with the highest preventive maintenance costs;
3. equipment that depends on another for its operation
4. equipment with the highest number of work hours
5. The default user of the equipment
6. maintenance history of the equipment
7. skill set and performance of each technician

With the above knowledge that is easily retrievable from a mobile or laptop, it becomes easy and crystal clear to devise the appropriate maintenance strategy that is cost-effective as well. A stitch in time saves nine!

Work order management software lets managers glance, assign, schedule, and prioritize all maintenance tasks. It helps them know the outstanding backlog count, areas of delay, the ratio of planned and reactive maintenance, frequently failing assets, spot specific business locations that lag in maintenance performance, etc., with a glance at the Dashboard using their mobile app.

Let’s delve deeper into the reduction in equipment maintenance costs.

An ideal maintenance expense reduction plan should aim for long-term cost reduction, make the least or insignificant impact on production, and provide a safe operating environment.

How to Reduce Equipment Maintenance Costs?

1. Eliminate repetitive tasks

You resort to preventive maintenance as reactive or breakdown maintenance costs 3 to 9 times more than routine maintenance. Statistics reveal 30% of preventive maintenance tasks are overdone meaninglessly. As the breakdown patterns of certain equipment are irregular, refine preventive maintenance schedules unique for each asset model and id.

Fix maintenance frequency based on usage, calendar, or operational parameter values. Drop tasks that are not associated with any failure modes. Invest some time in analyzing the root causes of a failure that will help minimize breakdowns in the long run.

2. Use High-Quality Spare Parts

Sourcing and fitting sub-standard parts reduces maintenance costs, but a business will incur more expenses eventually as the components tend to fail soon. Remember that low-quality parts do not undergo adequate quality control accounting for the low price. How nice would it be to procure genuine spares and assets by comparing quotes from various suppliers in a single window from the maintenance management software? You could do so by minimizing purchase delays at the best prices. Some software even go a step further in automating actions such as adding items to the purchase order list once the inventory items go below minimum re-order levels. With a workflow for checking the quality and quantity of purchased parts, you can order in bulk to negotiate better prices and facilitate purchase returns.

When such a facility is available, why do it manually?
Please ensure you lubricate the machine well, as poor lubrication is a common cause of machine failure. Lubricant is cheap, unlike gears, bearings, bushings, etc. You can automate lubrication tasks so that maintenance staff never forget it.

3. Reducing the labor and travel costs

Many plants face a shortage of craftspeople. Skilled workmen are rare these days. So it is necessary to make the best use of each technician. For this, you should have an insight into their real-time workload at any time. Get this insight from your mobile app at the time of assignment of tickets. With punch-in, punch-out, check-in, and check-out abilities, you can measure the actual work time for each day and task-wise time split-up. With digital work estimates and measurement of time, it becomes easy to negotiate and control final costs. Not just that! Field managers or customers can track the entire journey of a technician live via Geo Location tracking. Thus they can help them choose the shortest and best route to minimize fuel costs and production losses.

4. Optimize the asset life cycle 

If an asset fails repeatedly despite the best service, consider if it’s worth repairing. Knowing the current depreciation value of the asset using various techniques available in the market can help decide the right time for recycling or disposing it. The procurement management module integrated with the CMMS accelerates the asset replacement process by speeding up purchase request approvals, helping in obtaining quick invoices from various suppliers, and procuring the best products at the cheapest rates.

5. Train your entire team

Technologies evolve and advance with time. Not everyone on the floor is technology proficient. It is important to train every maintenance stakeholder – not just the technicians. The reason is the earlier an equipment failure or malfunction is spotted, the earlier it is fixed, reducing labor effort and costs. Employees or customers should acquaint themselves with the application usage to raise defects effortlessly using QR code mobile scan with a multimedia attachment of an image or short video to bring the issue to the notice of the maintenance team. Thus you can avoid costly and complicated repairs.

6. Standardize & simplify maintenance procedures 

Machinery may be robust with complicated operating procedures. But maintenance instructions for the machinery shouldn’t be so. Senior Techs can document maintenance procedures by breaking them down into checklist levels. It helps techs with lesser experience and skills to perform complete maintenance without skipping steps.

The CMMS application shall let a technician complete a maintenance task only after marking all checklists as complete. Besides, you can retain the knowledge of technicians based on incidental data for commonly occurring issues to boost First Time Fix Rates(FTFR). When FTFR improves with sensible solutions, Mean Time Between Failure(MTBF) also improves, cutting maintenance costs.

Can you afford to lose the above said advantages offered by a digital solution for maintenance management?

Act fast to achieve cost-optimized maintenance for business prosperity and sustenance!