What’s holding you back from scheduling more maintenance?

Warren

Planned work is the most important maintenance metric according to a survey by UpKeep. However, only 2 out of 5 maintenance managers say that more than half of their work is scheduled. This applies to maintenance teams of all types and specifically to teams in manufacturing environments where a planned maintenance percentage of less than 50% is generally considered unacceptable.

If planned maintenance is important to you, what’s holding you and your team back from scheduling more?

SummitLogistics

Generally it has to do with either lack of knowledge or under stressing how often maintenance should be performed. A lot of times a piece of equipment will only be serviced 2 times annually when it should actually be serviced three to four times annually. Also, another trick for some filler work and how to prevent downtime, is make sure that equipment that runs under heavy loads, extended periods of time, or is a major component in an operation has at least a basic inspection or check out list that is filled out every day. That machine can also have a little bit more comprehensive weekly check out, and a monthly check out as well. This machine may have a full top to bottom maintenance preformed either two, three, 4, or sometimes more times a year. There is always plenty of work to be done when it comes to maintenance. I found that rotating Crews or individuals every few weeks or every month on being in charge of certain pieces of equipment, stops a lot of cruise or individuals becoming complacent with the machines and developing blinders and not seeing problems before they arise. We have a refrigeration system that there is a main operator in the day shift and 1 in the afternoon shift, but other people who are operator qualified will also check in and perform the checks that need to be logged. This machine needs to have readings taken every hour, and the rotation has shown that people are born careful about how they log things when they know someone is coming right behind them. Also accidental mistakes are less because they are being double checked by someone else. All in all, maintenance crews are teams. They should work as such and task divided so that each person does each task and is proficient in each task. But that does not mean if someone specializes in a certain area do not utilize them for specialty work. You should utilize them, but rotate weaker members in so that they learn how to work uncertain pieces of equipment and learn certain tasks. All these are ways to keep everybody busy and not having to do the same repetitive tasks day in and day out and everything properly maintained and once schedules are laid out, it is a lot easier to organize these processes

Warren

SummitLogistics

How do you determine how often a piece of equipment need to be maintained?

SummitLogistics

Warren service manuals give a good rule of thumb about how many run hours before each maintenance. A lot of times it comes down to experience and how often certain components need to be changed. How often are you changing the filters? How often are you changing belts? Is this a humidifier that is in the wrong application and says that it needs to be serviced every 40 run hours which would be once a week? If I'm new to a piece of equipment, I will implement daily weekly and monthly log sheets, you can easily see when performance drops off and you will see Trends on breakdowns. User experience and your knowledge and you can formulate a good schedule and how often it needs to be maintained. You might have some stuff that you do every week you might have a few things you do every month. But usually oh, it comes down to a annual, semiannual, or quarterly full preventive maintenance. Through the years I have developed kind of a cheat sheet, if you will. If you are interested I could always send it over to you so you may look it over and let me know what you think.

Patrick

Warren It usually boils down to cost, especially at a church which has limited resources. Even though you do your best to plan ahead for preventative maintenance, there always seems to be an emergency repair that takes priority. During a recent PM work on our HVAC equipment, there were two serious issues that needed to be addressed, but were not planned for. Our building is now 12 years old and I am starting to see the wear and tear issues.

Warren

SummitLogistics

I would love to take a look at your cheat sheet, can you email it to me at warren@onupkeep.com?

Curious to see the differences on how often maintenance is needed between what the manual suggests and the cheat sheet you've created for different pieces of equipment.

Warren

Patrick

How difficult is it to get an increase in budget for maintenance in churches?

On the survey we took (https://onupkeep.com/maintenance-insights-2019), maintenance budgets were increasing for about 40% of people in different industries. Curious to see how maintenance budget is allocated for in churches.

SummitLogistics

Warren Sent over, let me know what you think and I sent a few terms in my email, I hope you don't mind. I'll say it again, I have tons of forms and templates I will have no problem sharing, it is just they represent a lot of hours and years of experience, I rather them not shared with the world, but anyone here is free to use and modify them if they will help them with their job and specific tasks. I would just like to know and get feedback on how they work out.

SummitLogistics

Warren Churches are a whole different ball game. They do have very limited funds and we do the best we can to do the best job with that by cutting deals and sometimes we end up having to do some things as "charity", but we also do the same thing for schools. As a small business, we like to give back to our community and donate things like schools and try and help support vocational programs and such. But we can only go so far, we are a FOR profit, not non for profit. So its a very thin line to walk.