Making the jump from reactive to preventive maintenance can help businesses save thousands of dollars as reactive maintenance can costs companies about 10 times the cost of planned preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance can also help in extending the life of your critical equipment and save you the hassle of fixing unpredictable machine failures. Even though businesses are aware of the potential benefits of switching to preventive maintenance systems, about 60% of enterprises still rely on the reactive maintenance model.
But why? Because reactive maintenance requires a little less manpower and low initial costs. However, reactive maintenance is a short-sighted approach and can prove detrimental in the long run. Here’s a step-by-step guide if you’re unsure as to why you should switch from reactive maintenance to SAP-based preventive maintenance.
Transitioning from reactive maintenance to preventive maintenance
Once you’ve decided to move to preventive maintenance involves how do you actually implement it at your workplace? Here’s a quick guide on how to efficiently adopt preventive maintenance at your organization.
Choose and customize your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)
This is the most important step in moving towards preventive maintenance as the CMMS can either work wonders or result in a complete failure if you do not decide wisely. Advanced maintenance software such as Crave’s cMaintenance can help you manage your maintenance needs effectively. Our app can be customized according to your needs, and it has the ability to track, organize, and manage custom data from multiple sources.
You can create custom work orders, update machine types, and their components, their costs, and equipment locations in the application interface. cMaintenance can keep historical data of all your assets enabling a smooth transition to preventive maintenance. Thus, you will have a strong diagnostic tool at your assistance for maintenance processes.
Define your goals
Once you’ve customized your CMMS, you should define your goals regarding your maintenance. What are the goals you want to accomplish? By how much do you want to reduce your maintenance costs? What are your current reactive maintenance procedures that need refining? These are some of the questions you should ask before moving ahead with preventive maintenance. You can break these goals into small milestones to track your progress and make changes if things aren’t going according to the plan.
Create a maintenance schedule
Once you have decided on your goals, you can create a maintenance schedule. You should start with a realistic, manageable workload. You can create a maintenance schedule on the app by updating your inventory details. You can then assign a technician to carry out the maintenance of a particular asset at a fixed time. The technician will be notified about the open work orders, and they can carry out the maintenance as per the schedule. Your maintenance procedure is streamlined as you can efficiently allocate human resources and time using cMaintenance.
Carry out the maintenance task
The technician that has been allocated the maintenance task will carry out the procedure as per the schedule. This may involve servicing, upgrading, or replacing machinery parts. The technician needs to carry out the procedure within the allocated time and with minimum resources.
Update the data on the app
The technician can update the maintenance data in real-time on the app. Managers can access the data and verify if the maintenance is as per schedule. They can later inspect whether the maintenance was carried out according to the specified guidelines and close the work order if they are satisfied. This brings transparency to your enterprise as the data can be accessed by authorized personnel in real-time.
Improve and scale your maintenance plan
Once you’re comfortable with a maintenance plan on a small scale, you can adapt it on a broader scale. You can keep making changes, update or tweak your maintenance schedule until you find the best one suited to your needs.
cMaintenance can help you switch seamlessly from reactive maintenance to a preventive one. It enables an end-to-end paperless process for your maintenance needs. It empowers businesses to have complete control over their maintenance process as the data is stored with SAP’s cloud integration. The data can be accessed anytime with complete timestamps from employees bringing transparency. Managers can have a complete audit of the hours and human resources spent on maintenance jobs. It even has a fully functional offline mode so that you never miss out on your work. To know more about how your business can leverage our cMaintenance solution, get in touch with us here.