In fact, a report by BOMA (the Building Owners and Managers Association) compared the costs of maintaining and replacing equipment and found that the longer a capital expense can be delayed, the greater its return on investment will be.

A preventive maintenance plan is an FDA requirement for many in the biomedical industry, but simply having one isn’t enough. It needs to be evolving, streamlined, proactive, and automated. Utilizing medical equipment service software can simplify that process.

Preventive maintenance work is done when there aren’t any fires to put out and creates useful information that a company can analyze to gauge when its equipment could fail in the future.

Automating the process saves time and creates accountability. It allows stakeholders to predict the hours people will put in and the parts necessary to keep things running prior to a breakdown, balancing preventive and reactive service. Techs can document what was done, record the overall health of the asset in question, and recommend repairs to keep everything online and functional.

Setting Up a Preventive Maintenance Plan

It isn’t difficult to implement best-practice maintenance planning and scheduling. There are five things to put on your checklist when getting started:

1. Know the numbers.
   A good preventive maintenance plan varies from business to business and industry to industry, but there’s one common thread among them all: numbers. Accurate data is the bedrock of a maintenance program. You have to know the average life span of your equipment, its age, and its failure rates if you’re going to plan properly to maintain and repair it.
   
   
2. Involve key stakeholders.
   When plans are created alone, they tend to be followed alone. Everyone impacted by a preventive maintenance plan should be involved in its design and implementation. Draw up a list of tasks or requirements for your preventive maintenance efforts, document which stakeholders will be affected, and get stakeholders into the room to talk through things together.
   
   
3. Establish a system to identify, tag, and track equipment.
   An effective preventive maintenance plan also needs to account for key equipment. Warranty information, service dates, and results all need to be recorded together. Invest in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), like BlueFolder, to take on this project. A good CMMS can improve the reliability of your equipment by as much as 35% to 50%.
   
   
4. Keep track of time.
   Maintenance tasks are most disruptive when their timescales are unknown. Some tasks might take only a few minutes, but others can drag on for days or weeks — and the uncertainty can be devastating. Track maintenance as it occurs to avoid negative outcomes, and use the data to anticipate future costs, personnel needs, and downtime.
   
   
5. Keep improving.
   Preventive maintenance plans should evolve with your company’s needs. They shouldn’t be set up and forgotten. Hit the pause button and evaluate your maintenance systems and processes. Optimization is a constant process, so make sure you are prepared to be in it long-term.

Having a best-practice maintenance planning and scheduling framework is a key part of running any business or maintenance department. While it might require an initial investment, building and executing an effective maintenance program will cut your costs in the long run and mitigate the negative effects of downtime.

Put the right maintenance systems in place, make sure everybody in your organization understands the processes involved, and dive into the numbers. When you set yourself up to be proactive instead of reactive, you’ll find success.

The post How to Implement a Preventive Maintenance Program appeared first on BlueFolder.

When constructing a plan for your health organization, aspects such as equipment maintenance programs and recall procedures must be addressed to sufficiently meet accreditation requirements. To better understand which critical aspects must be included for your organization, consider this guide to effectively writing a medical equipment management plan.

1. Set Your Objectives

Before diving straight into a medical equipment management plan, you must establish your objectives first. Here you should provide readers with an introduction to the efforts your organization will take to ensure both staff and patient safety. Such measures should include plans for routine inspections, testing, and maintenance efforts to properly address any and all medical equipment risk.

You can also use this section to outline the overarching goals for your equipment management plan. This section is typically brief and consists of a few sentences outlining high-level goals as well as bullet points of immediate objectives. 

Common initiatives found in the objective section of a medical equipment management plan include:

• To reach all necessary requirements of accreditation established by any regulatory agencies like the Joint Commission.
• To establish patient, employee, practitioner, and visitor protection and safety during medical equipment use.
• To ensure all medical equipment used within the facility is maintained to specific standards to allow safe operation and immediate readiness.
• To assess and uphold medical equipment performance to necessary standards.
• To encourage safe and effective use of medical equipment by staff and practitioners within the health facility. 

2. Conduct an Equipment Inventory 

After laying out the objectives for your medical equipment management plan, next, describe your organization’s approach to maintaining an inventory of medical equipment. Remember to gather any necessary details, such as serial numbers, equipment location details, and specific maintenance information, to input into your equipment/asset management database. By collecting and routinely updating these details, you can efficiently schedule any required maintenance and testing sessions to properly adhere to your previously-mentioned objectives.

To better reach medical equipment safety standards, don’t forget to also identify all high-risk medical equipment, such as ventilators, defibrillators, and oxygen concentrators, within your inventory. The malfunction and failure of these life-sustaining pieces of equipment can cause severe injury or death, so it’s imperative you use a ranking system to highlight these machines’ importance within your inventory. By acknowledging all high-risk equipment within your facility, you can better prioritize maintenance and safety testing to effectively uphold a strong safety standard. 

3. Establish an Equipment Maintenance Plan 

Once all details have been collected to form a database in your medical equipment asset management software, you can now use that information to establish an equipment maintenance plan. This step will help keep all equipment up to code and prepared for immediate use. Based on the equipment manufacturer’s recommendations and accreditation requirements, develop a maintenance schedule for each piece of equipment. 

While addressing each equipment piece, be sure to also include any details regarding required equipment testing. Routine assessments, such as electrical safety testing, can help you identify any underlying concerns or performance issues you’ll need to make note of in your maintenance management system. 

Information regarding both maintenance and testing procedures should always be recorded within your maintenance plan, especially in regards to high-risk equipment. These details must include problem descriptions, performed repairs, maintenance actions, technician details, department location, and completion dates. When constructing this plan, remember to acknowledge access information for the maintenance management system being used to organize these details as well. 

4. Include an Incident Response Procedure

In the event a piece of medical equipment is attributed to an incident of injury, illness, or death, all details regarding the equipment failure must be documented. In your medical equipment management plan, keep in mind you must list any necessary contact information regarding the Medical Equipment Coordinator and Director of Risk Management to allow for proper reporting. If neither role is readily accessible, be sure to include contact information for the appropriate department within your facility.

Refer back to your equipment asset management software and include any updated information, such as the time and date of the equipment failure. These details can then be used when technicians are dispatched for repair. Plus, it can streamline your work order process to swiftly address any upcoming maintenance tasks. Likewise, if the equipment undergoes testing, all details of the results should be noted within the software. From here, a decision can be made to determine if the equipment is safe for any further use. 

5. Equipment Recall Procedure

As with equipment incidents, procedures must also be established in the event of an equipment recall. In your medical equipment management plan, layout any required steps Equipment Coordinators are to follow when notified of an equipment recall. Distribution of any equipment recall notices should also be sent to any responsible staff members, such as the Director of Risk Management or similar personnel.

Any circulation of new or updated medical equipment recall notices must be tracked and updated within the software. Similarly, if any actions are taken to address the recall, keep in mind to always update the equipment asset management database of any repairs, replacements, or testing to effectively monitor the system performance.

Notice of these recalls must be inputted into the equipment asset management software as well. The proper personnel can then refer to the software to locate and collect any recalled equipment, and prevent any further use.

Establish an Effective Medical Equipment Management Plan Today 

The importance of a medical equipment management plan doesn’t just stop at the requirements needed for accreditation by medical regulatory agencies. From equipment asset management databases to equipment recall procedures, these plans are essential to the safety of patients, staff, practitioners, and visitors located within your healthcare organization. 

With the help of medical equipment service software, these essential parts of a strong medical equipment management plan can be easily implemented, so you can be confident in your practice’s ability to keep your business, and everyone in it, safe. For help upholding top safety standards and performance, contact BlueFolder today.

The post How to Write a Medical Equipment Maintenance Plan appeared first on BlueFolder.

What Is Preventative Maintenance?

Preventative maintenance is performed proactively on equipment to lessen the likelihood of failure (and reduce any unexpected downtime) and prolong its life. Using preventative maintenance, you can lower your overall maintenance costs, improve the scheduling of preventative maintenance activities, and be more prepared for maintenance work with the right supplies, parts, and labor.

It’s no secret that equipment and assets in a commercial building are susceptible to breaking down and wearing out over time. That’s why you must get proactive to reduce the likelihood of unexpected failures happening.

The Ultimate Checklist

Lighting

Failure to maintain lighting fixtures can destroy energy savings and cause poor light quality. To keep your lighting in good condition, make sure to:

• Check the exterior lights to ensure there are no torn cables and make sure all screws and hardware is in place and working properly
• Replace gaskets for a watertight seal
• Inspect lighting fixtures regularly
• Clean lens surfaces and dust lamps to improve lighting
• Make sure every lamp has the same color temperature
• Safely store used bulbs (because lighting elements could contain lead or mercury) until a certified vendor can remove them
• Re-aim adjustable lighting as needed
• Replace burned-out lamps
• Check any luminaries that have control gear, transformers, or accessories regularly (such as color filters, glare baffles, and spread lenses)

Safety

Conducting safety inspections regularly is essential for any commercial building to ensure the welfare of your propertyand its occupants. Make sure to replace old, faulty wiring and install smoke alarms according to local building codes. Checking these things monthly and replacing batteries every year is recommended. Inspect the fire alarms to check for fire hazards or anything that may be blocking the fire exits to the building. You also want to be sure there’s a fire extinguisher on every floor of the building and they’re regularly checked and recharged according to the manufacturer’s recommendation.

HVAC

To preserve indoor air quality and preserve energy efficiency, you must make sure your HVAC system is up to date. That means inspecting the system at least twice a year with seasonal start-up and run inspections and recharging P-traps or U-bend water traps for condensate drain pans. It’s also important to look for latch or screw updates, missing screw replacements, and gasket repairs that need to be made. You should also:

• Clean and replace air filters at regular intervals
• Inspect couplings and check for leaks
• Lubricate pumps once a year and inspect for unusual noises
• Ensure the superheat temperature falls between 10 to 20 degrees indirect pressure systems
• Buy coil cleaner (if you can reach the condenser coil) and wipe it off
• Inspect the settings for energy efficiency, especially the compressor, refrigerant charge, and thermal expansion valve periodically
• Disassemble screens and access panels in cooling towers for inspection, including the sump and spray nozzles, support structure, fill valve, fan blades, tower fill, gearbox, drive coupling, and motor bearings
• Clean the starter and cabinet and inspect the wiring
• Check motor starter contacts for wear and efficient operation

Electrical

To keep your electrical equipment in working condition, electricians recommend checking outlets, breaker boxes, wires, batteries, switches, and other electrical components at least once per year to ensure there’s no cracking or corrosion. Replace any batteries that need replacing and keep circuit boxes, grilles, and electrical storage free of dust, dirt, and debris. Performing all of this maintenance regularly can extend the life of your equipment.

Plumbing

Maintaining your plumbing systems requires following these guidelines:

• Check and replace refrigerant and oils
• Inspect couplings to detect any leaks
• Check fixtures in public restrooms and look for potential leaks
• Check boilers and water heaters
• Check contacts for wear and regularly run system tests
• Look at sump and sewage pumps at least once annually
• Lubricate water booster and circulation pump systems

Fire Safety

You should also perform regular preventative maintenance on the building’s fire safety system so that you can ensure it’ll work when it needs to. Check sprinkler heads, the central control panel, and pull stations. You’ll also want to check your standpipes and the pump supplying them. Make sure your pressure relief valves are properly calibrated. For instance, are you only getting 10 gallons of water when you should be getting 200 gallons per minute?

Bathrooms and Kitchens

Keeping the bathrooms and kitchens in great shape means getting inspections to discover damaged tiles, malfunctioning soap and paper towel dispensers, cracked or missing grout, and faulty hardware. If the company occupying the building handles food, get a general contractor to touch up the grout and caulk and inspect them every year before your inspection.

Interior

For optimum fire safety, doors and windows should be checked every year. Keeping the building as clean as possible can help ensure minimal wear and tear. Consider investing in a cleaning service that can do the floors, windows, bathrooms, and more.

Schedule carpet cleanings once every four to six months to remove allergens and to keep the place looking as professional-looking as possible. Clean the walls regularly and repaint them as necessary to enhance the building’s overall appearance. Hire a pest control expert to inspect the place routinely to prevent infestations before they occur or address them as soon as they do.

Exterior

Ensure the exterior of the property, including the roof, stays in good condition throughout the year. You can do that by performing a little preventative maintenance on it, just like you would the rest of the home. Exterior maintenance includes:

• Inspecting the roof at least twice per year (and after any serious storms)
• Clean the roof drains of debris
• Clean surfaces in parking garages twice per year (coating replacement every 10 years)
• Clean out the gutters
• Examine the sheet metal, copings, and previously repaired sections when walking the perimeter
• Check for wrinkles or tearing on roof-to-wall connections and flashings
• Conduct a moisture survey to find leaks

Considering Asset Management and Equipment Tracking Software

Preventative maintenance on commercial buildings is crucial if you want to avoid expensive repairs before they occur and keep your building in great shape throughout the years. Use this checklist to ensure you’re always one step ahead of things so you can always address any issues immediately. Or take things a step further and get asset management and equipment tracking software through BlueFolder that can help you schedule preventative maintenance and track service histories, warranties, and serial numbers.

The post A Preventative Maintenance Checklist for Commercial Buildings appeared first on BlueFolder.

A machine breakdown could disrupt the flow of the entire operation, not just of your business but also of your customers. And the financial impact of a prolonged downtime could be significant. This is why a preventive maintenance plan (PMP) is essential to minimize sudden failures of machinery and ensure a smooth, uninterrupted workflow.

Unlike reactive maintenance, which addresses a particular faulty machine, a preventive maintenance plan ensures its regular upkeep without waiting for disruptions to emerge. And this approach has multiple long-term advantages over adopting a reactive response.

What is a preventive maintenance plan?

A preventive maintenance plan is a system to extend the lifetime of machinery and take steps to actively prevent equipment failure. Preventive maintenance work is done when there aren’t any fires to put out and creates useful information that a company can analyze to gauge when its equipment could fail in the future.

In the biomedical industry, having a preventive maintenance plan is required by the FDA.

What’s the difference between preventive maintenance and reactive maintenance?

With reactive maintenance, technicians get mobilized when a malfunction occurs. Their focus is on resolving a specific issue. Preventive maintenance, on the other hand, adopts a more holistic approach where regular maintenance is carried out regardless of the machine condition.

Why do you need a preventive maintenance plan?

A preventive maintenance plan helps minimize future breakdowns and downtime and serves to extend the useful lifetime of machinery. It allows your teams to plan their work better and maintain operational efficiency without unexpected disruptions. A PMP is also important to ensure workplace safety and is often an essential requirement for certifications and audit compliance.

Besides, the cost of attending to a malfunction with reactive maintenance has many hidden facets. It’s not just limited to the repairing expenses. The cost of downtime, product unavailability, interruptions to the sales pipeline, and even lost credibility could have a far-reaching impact on your business. And the short-term expenses of a preventive maintenance plan are often dwarfed by these unplanned long-term costs. So in the long run, preventive action will serve as a cost-effective strategy for businesses that rely on critical machinery and equipment.

What are the five elements of a successful preventive maintenance plan?

Developing a preventive maintenance plan for your organization involves five essential steps.

1. Map your assets with detailed precision. Identify their business impact to determine criticality.
2. Collate OEM recommendation manuals. These will guide you through the servicing requirements for optimum results.
3. Get your on-ground staff involved. They will provide useful insights to make your plan practical and actionable.
4. Develop the preventive maintenance plan by setting goals, preparing schedules, planning resources and assigning responsibilities with KPIs.
5. Launch your plan and track progress. Evaluate effectiveness against the KPIs and make course corrections without delay.

Techs can document what was done, record the overall health of the asset in question, and recommend repairs to keep everything online and functional.

1. Map Critical Assets

The first step to creating a preventive maintenance plan is to prepare an asset inventory. It will help you identify all asset items critical for your workflow.

This inventory should be comprehensive and must cover each department. Include all important asset information such as their serial numbers, location, purchased date, recommended useful life, basic specifications, details of maintenance records, warranties and manufacturer information.

Needless to say, this is the most time-consuming step of the planning process. But it’s also the critical starting point for an effective preventive maintenance plan. So, avoid rushing and spend sufficient time to complete this stage. And continue to update this inventory as you purchase new items.

Then consider the business impact of each asset in the event of a breakdown. This risk assessment can include operational downtime, the level of disruption, cost of repairing and impact on safety and performance.

This approach enables you to prioritize and include only critical assets in your PMP by focusing on business impact as opposed to cost, size or prominence. For example, you may realize that sometimes the most critical assets are not the most expensive. And by focusing on operationally critical items, your business can develop a more efficient preventive plan and avoid wasting resources on low-impact assets.

2. Document Original Equipment Manufacturer Recommendations

Machinery and equipment usually come with detailed manuals from manufacturers. They could cover maintenance requirements, safe use of equipment, storage guidance, recommended components and advice on fault identification.

These Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) recommendations are often prepared following extensive product testing and customer feedback. So, they are specifically developed to help prolong the useful life of your equipment, while minimizing breakdowns. So it’s the easiest way to understand the regular maintenance requirements of your critical assets to keep them in their optimum condition throughout their life cycle.

And they will make it easier for you to plan the necessary tools, financial resources and staff to carry out the required work. You can also identify when you would need the services of a third-party supplier and budget these expenses ahead of time.

Following OEM recommendations are also important to keep warranties valid and to safeguard your investments in costly assets.

Therefore, record all OEM recommendation manuals in one location to make them easily accessible. Contact the manufacturer to get copies of any missing documents and update your database.

3. Bring Your On-Ground Technical and Operational Staff Into the Conversation

Getting your on-ground staff involved when developing your organization’s preventive maintenance plan is essential for several reasons.

From the maintenance technicians to the machine operators, these employees can be a source of useful information. They are the ones who work on-ground and understand the practical challenges, requirements and organizational dynamics that could affect the successful implementation of a PMP. So, they can provide valuable insights to customize preventive activities to fit your business environment and unique needs.

For example, different operations could use the same machine in completely different contexts. They will each have their own operating frequency, usage patterns and operators with different skill levels. So, following OEM recommendations alone will not help you plan effective preventive action.

But bringing in your on-ground teams into the PMP discussions can help you understand requirements unique to your business. For instance, they can provide insightful information about work order life cycles of reactive maintenance activities and their real on-ground impact.

And they can help you understand past servicing practices and challenges that might not be so evident when assessing the formal maintenance records. You can also identify how to optimize the preventive schedules and avoid an adverse impact on regular workflow. All these will be useful for you to develop a more realistic and actionable PMP.

These conversations can also help you identify hidden skill sets among teams. This will allow you to deploy them more effectively in your maintenance schedule and provide necessary training where there are gaps. You can also identify any hiring requirements and outsourcing needs.

4. Create Your Preventive Maintenance Plan

Once you have your asset inventory and all other critical information in place, you can proceed to develop your preventive maintenance plan. Start by setting goals. Determine what you intend to achieve at the end of the year. Quantify them as much as possible. It’s important for the PMP to deliver a measurable return on the investment.

Create schedules and plan resources based on your PMP goals. Schedules should consider short- and long-term requirements and specify daily, weekly, monthly and annual action. They should provide detailed guidance to the technician team on maintenance activities.

KPIs are another important part of an effective preventive maintenance plan. You should set them up at the outset, discuss with the maintenance team, and regularly monitor for progress.

Needless to say, you will be working with a large amount of complex data at this stage. And manually analyzing them could be a tedious and time-consuming task. It could prevent you from taking a big picture view and can increase room for human error.

Integrating Technology
BlueFolder’s field asset management software is an excellent tool to help you streamline this process. For example, it can help you maintain all asset information in one location, saving time and improving accessibility. You can instantly retrieve critical asset data such as serial numbers and warranties without flipping through files or scrolling worksheets.

It can also simplify various other time-consuming tasks for you and your team. For example, it can help you track past maintenance records, monitor maintenance progress, create new work orders, and alert you on upcoming schedules.

All these translate into significant time savings for the scheduling, monitoring and tracking processes of your preventive maintenance plan. It can help you quickly identify areas of inefficiency, deploy resources for optimum results, minimize paperwork, and dramatically improve accuracy.

And the instant reports and customizable dashboards can help organize data into meaningful information. These can further help improve your preventive maintenance plan and support decision making with actionable data.

5. Analyze and Adjust

All plans look perfect on paper, but you can only assess their real efficacy when implemented. And a preventive maintenance plan is no different. It will require various improvements, especially when it’s first rolled out. There will always be a period of trial and error, no matter how comprehensive it may seem.

Therefore, reviewing it periodically is essential to identify any course corrections and respond without delay. Track progress against the set KPIs and follow up on any setbacks. Use both quantitative and qualitative information to measure effectiveness and assess the overall impact on the business. Identify what is working and what is not and evaluate the bottlenecks in implementation.

Also, ensure that you speak to the on-ground staff regularly. Get input from the technicians and closely monitor the schedules. Are there gaps in communication? Is the workload too much for the maintenance team? Is it a skill gap that’s delaying work completion? Speak to the machine operators as well to identify any repeated red flags.

The reasons for an issue may not always be so obvious in a report. Therefore, these conversations can provide you deeper insights into gaps in achieving your goals. For example, a regular breakdown of a machine could sometimes result from its unsafe handling or a workflow issue. Document the feedback for future reference and adjust the PMP to get back on track.

Regularly evaluating the progress of your preventive maintenance plan is essential to identify implementation challenges and to address them on time before issues escalate. This exercise is also important when developing your next year’s plan so you can integrate key learnings to improve it further.

How do you implement a preventive maintenance plan?

Adopting a reactive approach to looking after machinery is often prompted by worries of recurring maintenance costs and additional resource needs associated with preventive action.

But in the long term, a reactive maintenance approach could drive your costs up, sometimes with irreversible consequences. The hidden costs of downtime, operational disruptions, and lost sales, customers and credibility could all add up to your breakdown expenses.

But a preventive maintenance plan can help you avoid sudden turmoil with a regular maintenance schedule. It can help minimize downtime, optimize equipment life span, and help your teams work safely and efficiently with minimum unplanned disruptions. And an effective plan can help you keep long-term expenses low by avoiding the costly impact of an unexpected breakdown.

Watch out for common pitfalls such as communication gaps, unrealistic KPIs and prioritizing non-critical assets. These could hamper the efficiency of your preventive maintenance plan and increase costs in the long term. For example, over maintenance is one of the common mistakes that can raise the overall costs of preventive activities and lower their ROI. But closely following this five-step process can help you stay the course for optimum results.

When developing a preventive maintenance plan, it’s important to set expectations from the outset to ensure it remains realistic from the start. Quantify the business impact and don’t forget to record qualitative benefits as well.

Using Technology to Amplify Results

Developing and managing a preventive maintenance plan is of course time and resource consuming. It involves collating, evaluating, assigning and tracking a massive amount of data. And the more assets you are responsible for, the more tedious this process becomes.

But a field asset management software can help you automate this process. It allows you to store all asset data in one place. You can also retrieve, evaluate and share your PMP-related data on a single platform, access past service records, and monitor the progress of current schedules. And the customizable dashboards and real-time reports can help you keep track of the PMP and make quick adjustments where needed. Overall, these digital tools can bring phenomenal efficiencies to your business.

So, if your organization is yet to benefit from an efficient preventive maintenance plan, contact BlueFolder today to see how our field asset management software can help you.

The post Creating a Preventive Maintenance Plan: A Definitive Guide appeared first on BlueFolder.

In order to be effective, a preventative maintenance schedule needs to be constantly adjusted, which is why old methods of providing preventative maintenance may not work as well (i.e, pen and paper, email, spreadsheets, etc.). Use technology to your advantage and create your preventative maintenance schedule using a robust preventative maintenance scheduling tool like the one we’ll discuss in detail below. But first, let’s take a look at four tips to help improve your preventive maintenance schedule.

1. Set Goals & Monitor Them

It’s great to have a preventative maintenance schedule, but you need to know what you’re trying to accomplish. And if you do use one, there are a few things to think about. For example, are machines and assets running more efficiently? Are you having less downtime?  Figure out what your goals are and write them down (and remember to be specific).

Set goals and consistently monitor them so that it’s easier for you to stay on track to meet them. Updating your goals as your business grows is important if you want it to keep growing. That means keeping your goals in a place where you can always refer back to them and make quick and easy updates when you need to.

2. Assess All of Your Machines and Assets, Not Just the Most Critical Ones

Assessing all of your machines and assets is essential to making sure all of your equipment is running at maximum efficiency. If you only pay attention to the most critical ones, you’re essentially running around putting out fires instead of taking the most efficient route to managing your equipment. If you want your assets and equipment to last, you’ve got to come up with a preventative maintenance plan that’s beneficial for all of your assets — not just the oldest or most critical ones.

3. Stop Performing Unnecessary Maintenance and Learn About Preventative Maintenance Schedules

Performing unnecessary maintenance is something no one wants to do and if you want to avoid it as well, you’ll need to find a way to make maintenance more routine. That’s where preventative maintenance schedules come in.

Preventative maintenance schedules can help you avoid performing unnecessary maintenance by establishing priorities based on the criticality of the assets. Creating a preventative maintenance schedule can also define all of the tasks that need to be performed throughout the year to ensure everything runs smoothly and few (if any) maintenance issues arise.

4. Continue to Improve Your PM Schedule By Analyzing and Adjusting Accordingly

Once you’ve created a preventative maintenance schedule, start analyzing it so you can make adjustments accordingly. See what’s working and what isn’t and make the necessary changes. Make sure to include key stakeholders in your preventative maintenance scheduling plan so everyone impacted can be involved in the design and implementation. It will ensure it’s the most effective plan it can be.

Finding a Preventative Maintenance Scheduling Solution

A comprehensive preventative maintenance scheduling solution is crucial to managing your field assets adequately. Field asset management software can help improve efficiency and increase equipment uptime because you’ll have all of your asset information in one, easy-to-access location.

Field asset management software like BlueFolder’s allows you to schedule preventative maintenance and track serial numbers, service histories, warranties, and more. Providing greater attention to detail is seamless with asset management software. Imagine being able to impress your customers with detailed information tracking all of the equipment you service.

Using BlueFolder’s customizable features can help you streamline your equipment maintenance. Some of those features include:

• Equipment records – This allows you to keep track of customer equipment and assets, track manufacturer and model information and serial numbers, as well as warranty expiration, and more.
• File attachments – This allows you to upload user manuals, photos, or other types of attachments to any asset or piece of equipment.
• Maintenance schedule – Get reminders when an asset or piece of equipment is due for service and create new work orders quickly and easily for the service. Or reset the next service date so you can set a reminder for the next service date.
• Custom fields – Create customized, searchable fields so you can keep track of all the data for each customer to make it easy to find the information you need quickly.
• Service history – Get instant access to each customer’s service history to keep your team organized and efficient, and allowing them to provide great customer service.
• Import/Export capabilities – If you have existing customer records or data, you can import them into BlueFolder using the built-in import tools.

You’ll also have access to service dashboards and custom reports and customizable equipment fields.

The service dashboard and custom reports help you maximize your equipment and asset management by helping you quickly access equipment information (like model numbers and serial numbers), helping you identify equipment replacement sales opportunities, and providing insights into which pieces of equipment are past due for service or have an approaching service date.

You can track equipment fields like Location, Item Name, Manufacturer Name, Status, Service Interval (the amount of time between service dates), and more. With custom fields, you’ll have the ability to track information for equipment that’s specific to your industry.

Simplify Managing Your Assets and Equipment

Creating a preventative maintenance schedule will make managing your assets and equipment seamless. BlueFolder’s easy-to-use asset management software can help you create an easy-to-follow preventative maintenance schedule that keeps all of the equipment you service in tip-top shape and saves you the most time and money. If you’re ready to take your preventative maintenance to the next level and partner with a provider that makes customers a priority, schedule a personalized one-on-one demo so you can see exactly what you’re getting before you spend a dime.

The post 4 Tips to Improve Your Preventative Maintenance Schedule appeared first on BlueFolder.