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. This seemingly simple change can deliver a better total cost of ownership for each asset you own, and when it’s handled by MINER’s factory-trained maintenance technician teams, it 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.
What Is Proactive Maintenance?
Proactive maintenance is a form of preventive maintenance, one based on using 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 organizations to accomplish more with less.
Why Is Proactive Maintenance Important?
Using a proactive maintenance strategy can represent a competitive advantage. A facility where every asset is being carefully monitored and maintained to optimal levels is better equipped to avoid unnecessary downtime than if equipment was allowed to run until failure.
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, and 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 overall productivity of the facility.
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.
How Can MINER Help With Your Maintenance Needs?
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.
Some of the key assets within your facility that can receive attention as part of a MINER proactive maintenance program 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 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 operational efficiency and overall equipment life.
- 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 costs due to leaking seals and inefficiency, an unplanned breakdown may cause costly 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 the service your assets need.
How Can You Customize Your Proactive Maintenance Strategy?
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 operations.
When you work with your MINER contact to create a tailored maintenance 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. It’s also 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 major 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.
Stop Relying Solely on Reactive Maintenance
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 can be a reliable partner for your organization every step of the way, providing a tailored 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.