For many companies, machinery maintenance is seen as boring and dirty but machinery maintenance is something that should not be taken lightly. Your ability to run an effective lean manufacturing business is reliant upon the effective and efficient running of your machinery.

While the cost of a regular maintenance plan may initially feel like as though it’s costly, it will be nowhere near as costly as a major equipment breakdown resulting in an inability to continue with production or service.

If you ensure your machinery is regularly maintained you will guarantee that it’s working at its optimum efficiency. And maintenance doesn’t just mean getting someone out every now and then to do an overhaul. Short daily checks and inspections should be standard to help identify potential problems before they happen. If you want to prevent breakdown you need to identify wear and tear early or be able to see if technical equipment isn’t functioning as efficiently as previously.

The true cost of a machine breakdown is often, much greater than the cost of the repair: it could cost you business. The repair cost may well cause a sharp intake of breath, but add in the possible costs to your business of non production or a reduction in, or loss of service and it could be a whole lot worse.

It’s simple. If you want to keep things as reliable as possible you need to make sure you have a machinery maintenance plan or contract in place. One that includes the more routine daily checks as well as regular overhauls.

With advances in technology some equipment has inbuilt intelligent maintenance systems, which show changes in performance. This allows you to assess or predict what could happen if things continue to deteriorate – but to be effective and prevent breakdown you have to act on that information. However, many simply have an alarm that lets you know loud and clear that there’s a problem. Once that alarm goes off, it’s probably already too late. You need to monitor wear and tear if you are going to actively anticipate when additional maintenance might be needed.

PRV is an engineering and fabrication company with a wide scope of services. As well as mechanical installations we also provide site fabrication and maintenance services and as engineers, where problems are tricky and other companies may falter trying to come up with solutions, we can often prevent breaks in service by solving and engineering solutions as we go along.