Proactive Maintenance
Proactive Maintenance for Your Facility
Your commercial buildings — warehouses, distribution centers, stores, offices and other facilities — contain countless pieces of equipment. How can you keep these assets in peak condition, creating a safe and efficient workplace for your whole team?
The key to reliability is to move away from purely reactive maintenance and embrace data-driven proactive maintenance practices.
Smarter Maintenance Starts Here: Be Proactive, Not Reactive
The seemingly simple change from reactive to proactive maintenance services can deliver a better total cost of ownership for each asset you own. When it’s handled by MINER’s factory-trained maintenance technician teams, this transformation doesn’t have to disrupt your workflows.
Companies that only react to issues rather than getting ahead of potential problems may suffer from unexpected downtime and equipment failures, increasing the risk of a serious accident and compromising their productivity. Proactive maintenance is a method specifically designed to minimize the chance of these scenarios occurring.
Considering the massive disruptive effects of equipment breakdowns, organizations that don’t use proactive maintenance are leaving money on the table. On the other hand, being proactive about facility issues can lead to unexpected savings.
Start Right Now!
Start Right Now!
What Is Proactive Maintenance?
Proactive maintenance is a form of preventive maintenance that uses data-based insights to perform preemptive repairs where they’re most needed. Rather than following a standard schedule, as in less sophisticated forms of planned maintenance, technicians can put their time to the best possible use.
When your organization embraces an effective proactive maintenance strategy, the approach is rooted in data. This means understanding every asset in the facility in terms of:
Suitability: Checking to ensure assets have been chosen and installed correctly is an important step in keeping them in top condition.
Age and wear: While not the only factors considered in proactive maintenance, the wear and tear on equipment can help determine an effective strategy.
Current status: Updates on the present operations of each asset in your facility allow a maintenance technician to prioritize and deal with any potential issue as it arises.
By analyzing that information, it’s possible for a maintenance team to prioritize which assets need maintenance and upkeep, delivering the right level of service to minimize downtime and breakdowns. This more targeted approach allows your organization to accomplish more with less as you follow best practices of maintenance around your loading dock.
Why Use Proactive Maintenance?
Using a proactive maintenance strategy can represent a competitive advantage. A facility where every asset is carefully monitored and maintained to optimal levels is better equipped to avoid unnecessary downtime than if equipment is allowed to run until failure.
At a glance, the most impactful reasons to set up proactive maintenance are:
Lower repair and maintenance cost
While it’s impossible to avoid all emergency repairs, there is value in finding problems before they lead to breakdowns. Reactive repairs should be a last resort.
Minimized downtime
Downtime limits productivity while causing ripple effects up and down the supply chain. Every unexpected breakdown avoided through proactive maintenance services adds value.
Improved worker safety
Employees feel safer and more confident working with machinery that has received targeted service as part of a proactive maintenance program.
Increased asset lifespan
Loading dock equipment that receives frequent maintenance rather than running to failure can last longer than assets that are allowed to break down.
Long-term operational efficiency
A proactive maintenance program is part of a more intentional approach to facility management, one that can lead to optimal total cost of ownership for all assets.
The overall goal of such a program is to limit unexpected interruptions. Preventing breakdowns wherever possible is important from a productivity standpoint. Every hour of unplanned downtime to equipment like commercial doors and dock levelers can cause supply chain delays. Therefore, proactive maintenance is a boost to efficiency and overall output.
More importantly, guarding against downtime is also a way to create a positive work environment for employees. Reducing the risk of unexpected equipment failures helps workers feel safe and confident as they perform their roles. The positive morale boost from improved working conditions can further enhance the facility’s overall productivity.
No matter your business’s exact needs or the type of facility in question, there is value in using a proactive maintenance plan instead of running until equipment failure. Assets from the simplest to the most sophisticated can benefit from a proactive approach, countering the need for costly repairs whenever possible.
Read our eBook for the details on increasing safety and uptime with maintenance.
FIND A LOADING DOCK REPAIR PROVIDER NEAR YOU
FIND A LOADING DOCK REPAIR PROVIDER NEAR YOU
How Our Proactive Maintenance Program Works
Implementing a high-level proactive maintenance plan — and achieving a low level of asset failure — is only possible when your organization teams with a capable partner. This is what MINER delivers, with a team of factory-trained technicians ready to deliver the services you need, from condition monitoring and routine maintenance tasks to emergency repair work as a last resort.
MINER provides two related offerings to help facilities build maintenance strategies that suit their needs:
SafeCHECK: This data-driven tool is designed to make equipment assessments and condition monitoring easier and more impactful. It’s the basis for programs that meet organizations’ diverse maintenance needs.
SafeACT: Our proactive maintenance program allows facilities to create proactive maintenance strategies perfectly tailored to their requirements based on their equipment layouts, budgets and productivity goals.
Some of the key assets within your facility that can benefit from maintenance management include:
Commercial and dock doors
Your door assets are the place where your commercial building connects with the outside world. When a door suffers an asset failure, you can lose hours of productivity, demonstrating the need for a proactive maintenance approach to keep your facility operating at peak efficiency.
Loading dock equipment
The critical assets on your loading dock — dock levelers, dock plates, seals, shelters, vehicle restraints and much more — must remain in working condition to keep the supply chain moving. A machine failure on the dock could also raise the risk of a harmful accident, further cementing the importance of asset management for this equipment.
Automated and motorized assets
The more sophisticated a piece of equipment is, the more important it can be to apply a tailored proactive maintenance plan. Motorized assets with moving parts should have careful, confident monitoring to maximize equipment reliability, operational efficiency and overall usable lifespan.
Temperature control solutions
An asset failure affecting a temperature control system can have knock-on effects that cause additional costly problems. Not only is there the issue of ongoing maintenance costs due to leaking seals and inefficiency, but an unplanned breakdown may cause expensive spoilage of goods.
Rather than treating all these assets and more as one undifferentiated group and delivering standard scheduled maintenance, MINER technicians can form a proactive action plan based on suitability, wear and current status. This data-based approach is designed to provide a service that suits your maintenance needs.
Customize Your Maintenance Strategy With MINER
Creating a proactive maintenance program that suits your organization means tailoring your approach to both the assets in place and your overall business objectives. You may be surprised just how many ways there are to put money back into your budget through careful application of well-chosen maintenance practices.
When you work with your MINER contact to create a tailored maintenance management strategy, the results for your commercial facility can include:
Better, more accurate TCO and ROI calculations
The analysis and surveys that go into a proactive maintenance strategy do more than just help to create a maintenance schedule. They also have asset management value. It’s possible to track each asset’s condition, cost and value in greater detail, allowing you to measure total cost of ownership and return on investment.
Compliance and safety awareness
Properly maintained equipment is a key component of compliance with the facility rules laid down by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The agency requires that employers provide a safe, healthy work environment, and reliable assets are major contributors to such a setting.
Operational efficiency throughout the facility
Unplanned downtime is a drain on resources. An asset failure can cause the whole supply chain to shut down for hours at a time, which leaves employees idle and has knock-on effects impacting a variety of logistics processes. Maximizing uptime defends against such issues.
The ultimate result of proactive maintenance can be the ability to compete within your industry. Smooth, uninterrupted operations can add up to better long-term productivity, and it can be easier to attract and retain top-performing employees when you’re able to provide safer, more reliable equipment.
From Reactive to Proactive: Why It Matters
It’s unfortunately common for organizations to rely solely on reactive maintenance and run their equipment to failure. By moving beyond this model and embracing a proactive maintenance strategy, you can give your business an ongoing advantage. Businesses that have embraced more proactive care for their assets have achieved up to 50% reductions in unplanned emergency repairs.
MINER’s technicians are experts at managing, maintaining and optimizing every piece of equipment around the loading dock and in the rest of your warehouse or distribution center. Use our list to make sure you’re taking care of all the risk factors around your loading dock.
Get Started With Proactive Maintenance From MINER
MINER can be a reliable partner for your organization every step of the way, providing a tailored facilities management strategy through a single point of contact. This relationship can extend through the selection and installation of new assets, ensuring your business has the best possible equipment for its needs going forward, across all its facilities.