Preventative maintenance is vital to a good industrial maintenance plan. A well-planned preventative maintenance schedule for your equipment will protect your most valuable assets and keep them functioning better for longer. Explore how regular care can maximize your uptime and ensure you get the best ROI from your equipment and your team.
What Does Preventative Maintenance Look Like?
Preventative maintenance is one of the most important aspects of industrial maintenance, as it is what helps businesses avoid emergency situations and keep everything running smoothly. This scheduled, prevention-based approach to maintenance combines equipment inspections with basic cleaning and repairs, giving your equipment some well-deserved TLC. It can also include lubricating moving parts, checking electrical connections, topping off fluid levels, and equipment tests such as load testing.
Five Benefits of Preventative Maintenance in Industrial Operations
If you had to choose between preventing an emergency breakdown or safety failure and taking deliberate time to inspect, clean, and repair your equipment, which would you choose? The answer may seem obvious, and yet preventative maintenance is one of the most frequently overlooked parts of industrial maintenance workflows.
Here are five reasons why preventative maintenance is worth the time and effort:
1. Extends Equipment Lifespan
Industrial equipment that is properly maintained will inherently last longer than equipment that is allowed to wear down and become vulnerable to severe breakdowns. For example, a well-maintained conveyor belt can last up to a decade, even with frequent heavy-duty use! On the flip side, the belt on your conveyor system may need to be replaced every few months if it is not cared for properly.
Conveyor belts can easily get clogged, torn, or stretched from products and debris getting between the belt and rollers or delaminating the surface of the belt. Preventative maintenance ensures that these issues are caught and addressed early on, before they cause extensive damage that requires replacement or more costly repairs.
2. Avoids Costly Breakdowns
If you’ve ever worked with industrial equipment, you know how expensive it can be to repair or replace following a breakdown. The difference between the cost of taking a little downtime for cleaning, inspecting, and maintaining equipment versus completely replacing vital equipment is astronomical. By treating your industrial equipment with proper care through preventative maintenance, you’re saving money in more ways than one!
3. Ensures Safety Compliance
Industrial equipment and machines are very powerful tools in manufacturing and similar industries, but they can also present significant health and safety hazards to workers in the event of sudden breakdowns or failures. For instance, if the pressure gauges are off on a compactor or hydraulic door, it could close abruptly on an employee and cause significant harm.
Safety compliance measures exist to ensure these types of situations don’t happen by keeping equipment performing safely and reliably. Through regular preventative maintenance, you can rest assured your machinery is within compliance, and you and your employees are safe from dangerous situations and the expenses of dealing with a workplace injury incident.
4. Enhance Equipment Efficiency
Equipment that isn’t hindered by weakening parts or debris clogging moving parts will operate much more efficiently. Have you ever noticed how much smoother rollers move after being freshly lubricated? This is an excellent example of how equipment is more efficient when treated properly! Failing to lubricate moving parts will lead to more friction, which both wears down these parts and makes them move less smoothly.
In addition to enhancing efficiency for productivity, preventative maintenance helps reduce energy and resource consumption by improving machine operations. More efficient machines require less energy and resources to operate, saving you money and helping our planet in one fell swoop.
5. Allows for More Predictable Downtime
When industrial equipment is being cleaned, inspected, or repaired, it typically cannot be actively operating as part of a workflow. That means downtime, which no business wants! This is why preventative maintenance is so commonly neglected, but it’s also why preventative maintenance is so important!
As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Because the goal of preventative maintenance is to prevent damage and unexpected breakdowns, it inherently allows for more predictability with equipment downtime as you can schedule it around your other essential workflows. Preventative maintenance can be performed after hours, before the start of the workday, or during previously-planned routine breaks so downtime is minimal or none!
Protect Your Industrial Assets with Mathews Mechanical
Preventative maintenance is more than just wiping down your equipment at the end of the day. The most effective preventative maintenance should be performed by an expert industrial maintenance team. Mathews Mechanical offers preventative maintenance service agreements built around your schedule and operational needs to maximize uptime and catch any potential risks before they become costly emergencies.
Our preventative maintenance team is well-versed in a wide array of industrial equipment, including conveyor systems, compactors and balers, dock doors and levelers, hydraulic and pneumatic systems, hoists and cranes, and stretch wrap machines.
If you’re ready to give your industrial equipment the care it deserves, contact us at Mathews Mechanical to learn more about our preventative industrial and mechanical maintenance services!
