Tips for optimising your maintenance strategy

There are countless benefits to being armed with a successful maintenance strategy, from reducing equipment failures, to preventing breakdowns and increasing reliability and efficiency.

What’s more, you’re able to schedule repairs during normal outages, extend the lifespan of your machinery (because it’s being well looked after) and maximise plant productivity.

It’s also an incredibly effective way to achieve valuable cost savings. For instance, as a result of having a successful maintenance strategy in place, one of our customers saw their maintenance spend fall by 32%. Another saved 48% on HP filters alone. And another, saw component life in their injection moulding machine increase by a factor of 1.6.

While it’s clear there are many valuable benefits to having an effective maintenance strategy in place, it’s not always obvious what they should necessarily encompass or how best to enhance them. Here are our top five tips for optimising your maintenance strategy:

TIP 1: Use preventative maintenance

Inspect your equipment regularly and identify any necessary repairs to minimise unplanned downtime that could costly you dearly – in time and money.

TIP 2: Commit to predictive maintenance

As well as taking a preventative approach to your maintenance, it’s equally important you use condition monitoring to highlight any operating conditions that could lead to failure.

TIP 3: Control your contamination

As obvious as it sounds, make sure you take a look at your storage methods to ensure that any contamination isn’t being introduced during your oil changes.

TIP 4: Train your maintenance staff

Make sure your staff are fully up to speed with your maintenance strategy and are implementing it efficiently and effectively by investing some time in providing them with adequate training.

TIP 5: Having a spare parts strategy

Last, but not least, having the minimum spare parts that you need will help ensure you’re not caught out by long lead times or other supply-related problems.

Following these best practice tips will ensure you don’t just simply have a maintenance strategy in place, but a strategy that delivers you with the best possible results, improves your profitability and productivity.

Discover the key manufacturing problems oil analysis solves, check out our infographic, ‘3 problems you can prevent with the right oil analysis.’