The Advantages of a Preventative Maintenance Program

Originally published by The Capterra Field Service Management Blog

Brush your teeth, get your oil changed, wash your clothes, and mow your lawn. If you want things to stay functional and avoid expensive repairs, you undertake some preventative maintenance. Businesses are no different — except instead of a beautiful smile on the line, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

The advantages of a preventative maintenance program are many and varied, but today we’re going to focus on the three big ones. In addition, we’ll talk about the value of building out a basic program and how to find some software to keep everything in place.

Cost reduction

The number-one reason to have a preventative maintenance program in place is to keep everything running. If your business relies on machines that can break, you should a system in place to get those machines up and running again ASAP. For every hour that a piece of equipment is down, your company loses revenue.

On top of revenue loss, broken equipment is almost always more expensive to repair than it is to maintain. Just think about the difference in the cost of your oil changes — even over the course of ten years — compared to the cost of replacing a seized engine.

The key to a good maintenance program lies in carefully planning out all of your equipment’s required maintenance. Luckily, any maintenance management software should be able to cover this planning. Just enter the type of maintenance to be performed, the frequency, and — in some cases — the skills required. The system will do the rest, keeping everything ticking over like new.

Safety

Coming in a close second — first in our hearts, I’m sure — is the increased level of safety that comes with preventative maintenance. A dull knife is a dangerous knife, because you have to use more force to cut, which means that you have less control of the knife.

Likewise, a machine with parts that grind or edges that have been dulled and warped can lead to safety issues. Preventative maintenance gives you a solid timeline for inspecting the machines that you use every day.

Even if you’re just swapping out a filter, you have an opportunity to closely inspect a machine to make sure nothing else needs attention. The more your techs come into contact with a machine, the less likely those machines are to go rogue and injure somewhere.

Efficiency

Let’s talk about how things scale. When you buy a coffee from Starbucks, you spend $3. When you buy a coffee every single workday, you spend about $750 each year. This is why we buy bulk coffee and do the work ourselves — to keep more of the money we make.

In the same way, when your machines start to work at less-than-optimal efficiency, you stand to lose thousands of dollars each month.

Instead of letting it all go to pot, you’ll be keeping things alive longer. This article is already mainly a list of ways to keep your car in basic, functional shape, but here’s another. You run cars into the ground when you use them. Unless you go nuts on your maintenance. Then you end up with 3,039,122 miles on your 1966 Volvo.

Preventative maintenance makes that kind of longevity possible.

Preventative maintenance software

Let’s look at NetFacilties as an example of how a software package manages preventative maintenance. This is just one example of many, and you can get a huge set of options over in Capterra’s maintenance directory.

In NetFacilities, you’ll enter your assets into the software and then those assets will automagically generate work orders based on the frequency and type of maintenance required by those assets. The work orders will contain details on the work to be done and can be assigned to a specific employee. You can even setup the system to generate work orders when it achieves a specific reading — mileage, cycles, etc..

NetFaclities then wraps all that information up on your dashboard, so you can see at glance what work needs to be done, what’s overdue, and what you’ve got coming up over the next few weeks and months.

In short, you spend a few minutes setting up the system and then you never have to worry about it again.

Next steps

If your business is ready to start looking into preventative maintenance, you can swing over to the Capterra CMMS directory for a full list of options. If you’ve already got an idea of what you need, but you want some help narrowing the field, give our software matching service a try — it’s 100% free for small businesses.