6 Equipment Maintenance Mistakes to Avoid

Some organizations and industries that invest heavily in pieces of machinery and equipment acknowledge the need to maintain their equipment to avoid reduced productivity and increase the cost. While you or your organization embrace the positive approach to improve equipment reliability and maintenance management, chances are that you might have overlooked some fundamental precautions!

There is such a thing as maintenance mistakes, and in this article, we have listed 6 of the mistakes that could prove detrimental to your machine lifespan.

Categories of Equipment Maintenance

There are three categories of equipment maintenance.

• Preventive: Maintenance before a breakdown
• Corrective: Maintenance after a breakdown
• Predictive: Maintenance in anticipation of a breakdown

Equipment maintenance is essential for continuous service, extended machine life, cost efficiency, safety, to conserve the environment and to meet legal requirements.

Six equipment maintenance mistakes to avoid

1. Poor data capture

Are your maintenance records up to date? When last did you service your equipment? How frequently does the machine break down? What solution did you adopt?

When you don’t keep an accurate and up-to-date record of the use and maintenance of your pieces of equipment, you’re setting it up for degradation. Adequate data capture will help you identify any abnormality before it becomes a major problem. It will also help you identify the circumstances behind which the machine encountered glitches. This will help forestall further damage.

2. Poor maintenance routine

Plan the frequency of preventive maintenance. Don’t wait till there is a major fault or breakdown before you seek maintenance. Such planning will help the organization to draw a budget for maintenance ahead of time.

3. Wrong replacement parts

Ensure that worn parts are replaced with the right replacements. Often, you may be worried that those parts are expensive to replace, and rightly so. But using the wrong replacement part to improvise can break down the equipment even further and cause greater expenses.

Endeavor to have the spare parts ready beforehand; else, you might have to stop production while waiting for the new parts. You can get appropriate replacement steel balls for ball bearing to repair appliances, lock mechanisms or pumps. With proper planning, you won’t have to cough out impromptu funds to replace worn-out parts.

4. Over-maintenance

Over maintenance is as detrimental as poor maintenance. Machines are fragile and frequent loosening and maintenance will facilitate quicker breakdown. In addition to that, it leads to overspending, waste of technician time, unnecessary use of inventories and collation of inaccurate information. With over-maintenance, machines will experience quicker wear and tears. That is not the type of future you want for your asset.

5. Not investing in preventive maintenance

The difference between preventive and predictive or fault-finding maintenance is that the latter seeks faulty areas and addresses those areas. Most organizations stick to that routine because it prevents unnecessary maintenance. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that waiting for a piece of equipment to show signs of damage before maintenance is not always ideal. Equipment may not give you signs before it gives up on you. Organizations should include preventive maintenance in their budget with predictive maintenance as a backup for any oversights. more

6. Not giving room for feedback from technicians

When you invite technicians to carry out maintenance services on your equipment, ensure that you collect comments and feedback from them. The information they give will prove useful for further analysis, proper instruction and refined maintenance schedule.