In the past year, many companies, faced with tightening their budgets, have shifted their focus to reactive maintenance, only addressing urgent repairs when systems or equipment fail. While this approach can help manage short-term cash flow issues, it can come with hidden long-term costs.
While reactive maintenance may seem less expensive initially, when equipment failure happens at a critical point, as it invariably does, the result will be unplanned downtime, costly repairs, and reduced production. It’s Murphy’s Law people, if your equipment is going to fail it will fail when you have the maximum number of clients waiting on deliveries, there’s nothing surer.
The underlying beast is the risk of accumulated wear and tear on equipment that is not being regularly inspected or maintained. Over time, these small issues, which could have been caught early through preventive measures, can grow into larger, more expensive problems.
It’s all about the base
Preventive maintenance involves regularly scheduled checks, repairs, and upgrades to prevent issues before they arise. This allows for better control over costs and production schedules, but for it to be effective, you’ll need to have a baseline. This baseline is established through regular inspections and monitoring and is a reference point for the condition of your assets and equipment. Having a baseline will help to identify potential issues early before they morph into catastrophic failures.
On completion of these baseline inspections, detailed reports can be generated which will give you the information you need to make informed decisions about your assets. This kind of data is invaluable for empowering you to proactively plan your maintenance schedule, and clients who have taken advantage of this service routinely tell us they wonder why they didn’t get on the baseline bandwagon sooner!
Holiday Season: beers, barbeques and bottlenecks!
As we approach the holiday season, production is starting to ramp up in a number of industries, creating a logistics bottleneck that can impact both supply chain and maintenance schedules.
With an increased demand for products in the run-up to the holidays, suppliers and manufacturers tend to experience greater lead times on materials and parts from mid-November onwards. This problem is exacerbated by companies preparing for their annual holiday shutdowns, which could see them close or reduce their operations for as long as four weeks, creating a backlog of orders and delivery delays.
To mitigate this problem, it is critical that you order materials and parts well before you actually need them, and you’ll also need to think ahead about scheduling maintenance when there might be fewer people on-site to manage issues. Now is a good opportunity for more extensive preventive maintenance because production is typically lower, and systems are not as stressed. Planning these maintenance windows ahead of time can prevent problems when business ramps up again post-holiday.
Here at BTS Engineering, we are thrilled to see, after a particularly challenging period, that the majority of businesses are starting to experience positive signs of market recovery across most sectors. As production and demand increase, it’s imperative that companies remain agile in order to capture opportunities for more orders, higher production volumes, and greater demand for products and services. The goal now should be to make the most of this positive momentum and continue to invest in processes and infrastructure that will ensure your business remains sustainable well into the future.
After a couple of lean years, it really does feel like the industrial sector has started to turn a corner in 2024, so in order to stay ahead of the game, we are encouraging our clients to gear up with the personnel, tools, and equipment that will allow them to make the most of the coming boom. Call the team at BTS Engineering today at 0800 885383 or email bespoketradesolutions@gmail.com.