Here’s the Guide to Build an Effective Maintenance Plan

Maintenances managed well can positively impact every area of the company, preventing the production downtime and increasing the assets’ life. It’s time that enterprises take a leap from reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance with the right tools and technologies available like cloud-based maintenance management software.

Are you among the companies that are still relying on the traditional approach to maintenance management, which is inefficient and expensive? You certainly need to rethink and restructure your maintenance management programs. It will not only prevent downtime but will also save your time and money due to sudden failures of equipment, instruments, and critical devices.

Fortunately, you have advanced maintenance management systems for analyzing the data and trends to predict and prevent malfunctions and breakdowns. It will not be wrong to cite that it’s time to give up the reactive maintenance approach for good.

According to a recent research study, it is estimated that an organization usually spends 50% of its productive time on managing maintenances and emergency repairs. The maintenance becomes five times more expensive with the reactive approach. If you want to save such heavy burdens from the budget and productivity, you must consider a preventive attitude. 

As the name the proactive or preventive maintenance itself suggests, you need to stay prepared ahead of failure; you must have an effective maintenance plan to leverage the preventive approach’s full potential.

How would you build an effective maintenance plan?

Since every business has different production requirements and schedules, so are their maintenance requirements. This post will look at the seven-step guide to build an effective maintenance plan that will work for almost every business. 

The guide is simple and straightforward. It requires you to:

1. Prioritize Maintenance Schedules for Critical Assets First

The first and foremost step of an effective maintenance plan requires you to prioritize the maintenances of the most critical assets. If you prioritize and take one asset at a time, you will be able to analyze results quickly and plan for other assets accordingly. Your team members will also get enough time to adjust to new transitions that a proactive approach requires in the processes and workflows. For identifying the most critical assets, you may consider the three things, including:

• Importance of the asset for the production success.
• How frequently the asset requires maintenance?
• What are the total expenses of repairs and failures? Whether they are significantly higher?

Classify your assets based on these considerations; you will get a list of critical assets quickly. 

2. Gather All the Relevant Details for Appropriate Planning and Scheduling

The second step requires you to gather all the relevant information about the critical assets, for example – the number of times it has been maintained, what sort of failures already occurred, what are the most common issue, date of purchase, warranty, vendor name, supplier name, any replacement/repairs done, and much more. All such details can give you a quick overview of equipment’s health and safety so you can plan and schedule their maintenance activities, respectively. It will also help you identify the devices that need to be replaced urgently to avoid any harmful incidents in the production unit, which may pose life-risks for your workforce.

You can develop a standardized form or template for your assets to record their details consistently. It will make maintenance planning and scheduling activities even more efficient.

3. Invest in a Maintenance Management Software

Change is The Only Constant! You cannot expect the same efficiency and accuracy from the traditional maintenance management systems that you can get from the next-generation maintenance management software. It will help if you consider upgrading advanced software to manage your equipment maintenance schedules without any errors. The software will save you enough time to focus on productive tasks. 

With maintenance management software, you can easily manage production instabilities, malfunctioning machines, or complete breakdowns to avoid potential production downtime. The software also allows you to set up alerts and notifications to keep your team notified before the maintenance is due. It simplifies the tracking and analyzing data trends regarding downtime and production failures to create an effective maintenance plan and make informed decisions.

4. Make Data-Driven Decisions and Changes for Maintenance Plans

Data-decisions are reliable since analyzing the data provides a clear picture of the maintenance strategies that are performing well and the ones that still need improvements. However, it is a recommended practice to implement proactive maintenance strategies for one or two critical assets, to begin with. If it works well, you can continue with other assets’ maintenance as well. Also, it is the most cost-effective way to implement changes to the existing systems and processes.

All you need to make data-driven decisions and changes in your maintenance plans are to systematically record all the activities. You can choose an advanced maintenance management software that automatically documents every event and activity with date, time, and owner details. It will also be helpful at the time of quality inspections and audits. 

5. Track the Maintenance Results and Adjust Accordingly

Tracking the maintenance results can prove helpful to adjust to new strategies and plans. You must follow the instruments’ performance before and after the maintenance to have a clear picture of whether the existing maintenance strategy is working for your business. Else, it will merely increase your expenses – including the maintenance costs and downtime. If the maintenance results aren’t satisfactory enough, it’s high time to make some changes.

However, these changes must be well-coordinated with the team members involved for successful change implementation. If documented regularly, you can also compare the maintenance results with the records for better insights. 

The good news is that tracking the maintenance results isn’t challenging anymore since you have advanced maintenance management software to improve traceability significantly. You can quickly analyze results from every maintenance activity performed without missing a single performance metric. Isn’t it a smarter way of making productive adjustments to your maintenance schedules?

6. Take Inputs from your Maintenance Operators Regularly

To adopt the proactive approach, you should not rely on software and tools alone. Your people are involved too. Count their opinion since they are the ones who work with the machines and equipment every day. They can give you many insights that your software may not provide since the maintenance logs and reports are all about the data you provide for processing.

You may identify many preventive solutions to the most frequent breakdowns by just taking inputs from the operators. For example, he usually gets back the equipment up and running when there are no spare parts or components available or the details are experiencing wear and tear that others may not notice. You can also deploy a team to inspect such things at the primary level. Only then will you be able to implement a preventive maintenance plan in real terms.

7. Keep It All Documented in a Secure Environment

In many of the steps above, we have discussed the importance of keeping the maintenance-related details documented well – be it the plan, policies, results, compliance requirements, or any other specific document. The proper documentation can help you drive consistency throughout the organization and foster informed decision-making.

You can leverage a cloud-based maintenance management software that automatically documents every maintenance record on a centralized platform, ensuring safety, flexibility, and accessibility. The cloud solution also eliminates the need to set up additional infrastructure or acquire more storage space for storing the documents. You can expand the cloud storage as per your requirement. Don’t you think a cloud platform can be a real game-changer?

Following this seven-step guide will bring you closer to your maintenance objectives without any hassles. In addition to these steps, what makes your maintenance plan effective is personnel with the right skill set to manage maintenance tasks. You may need an integrated training management system and maintenance management software to ensure that your maintenance operators understand their roles, responsibility, and accountability.

The better alternative could be a Cloud-Driven Maintenance Management Software with third-party integration capability like Qualityze Maintenance Management. It can be seamlessly integrated with the existing training management system to ensure your employee’s competency. 

Qualityze Maintenance Management Solution enables organizations to create and manage maintenance programs to ensure the equipment’s safe functioning and hassle-free production. You can integrate. It enables you to enhance your assets’ performance, including equipment and spare parts, while decreasing downtime and overall maintenance costs.  

With Qualityze Maintenance Management, you can: Create Asset and Criteria Library, Manage Maintenance Schedules, Implement effective maintenance plan, Perform Scheduled/Unscheduled Maintenance, Quickly Alert the Equipment Owners for Maintenance Schedules, Get Improved Visibility of Equipment Performance, Have Better Control On Maintenance Records and Data, and much more. If you are interested to get more information about Qualityze Maintenance Management Software, please get in touch with our customer success team on 1-877-207-8616 or write to us at info@qualityze.com, and we will be right there for you.