7 Best Practices to Use and Maintain Your Equipment

Prompt equipment management and maintenance boil down to ensuring proper functionality and reducing common breakdowns. Here are some of the best tips and tricks that will allow you to use and maintain your equipment efficiently.

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Despite the nature of the industry, it is crucial to use and maintain your valuable equipment. Ideally, you should follow a set of practices to maintain and use your business equipment. Besides, the lifeblood of your company deserves proper care. 

Once you start to use and maintain your equipment properly, you’ll notice fewer downtime issues. As a result, you will start to waste less time and it will improve your bottom line over time. In 2022, it makes perfect sense to maintain your equipment in solid working condition.

Prompt equipment management and maintenance boil down to ensuring proper functionality and reducing common breakdowns. For starters, you should have all the tools to service, replace, and repair your equipment. This approach will ensure operational accessibility and avoid production fluctuations.

Now, let’s dive into some of the best tips and tricks that will allow you to use and maintain your equipment efficiently:

Best Practices to Maintain Your Valuable Equipment

1. Label Your Equipment Items

One of the best practices to maintain and manage your equipment is to use labels. So, use labels for your equipment items with a unique name, code, or number. It is the best way to avoid equipment items mixing up for good.

For the sake of convenience, make sure to keep an up-to-date list of all equipment items. For instance, you can use a free and intuitive equipment management spreadsheet to ensure an up-to-date equipment database for different users. Depending on your workload requirements, you can opt for an offline or cloud-based spreadsheet. 

2. Add Location Parameters for your Equipment Items

Another best practice to use equipment items is to set a home location for each piece of equipment. This is ideal to keep everyone informed about the location of different equipment items and check items that are not in use. On the flip side, assign a specific person for particular equipment items. This will inform everyone as to who to reach out if there are any issues with the equipment.

3. Use a Dedicated Calendar

It might sound like a conventional tip, but using a calendar to book or mark equipment items makes things easier. In terms of reservation or booking details, you can add a brief description, equipment list, responsible users for reservation, predetermined use time, and the time of return.

4. Ensure Reservation for Each Equipment Item

Essentially, make sure to check your equipment and create a reservation mark. Again, you can use a dedicated calendar or separate list to mark reservations. You can also reference each reservation entry with the start date and time. In the digital age, take advantage of using a calendar or separate list. It makes even more sense when the time and data on the check-out differs from the reservation time and data.

5. Use and Collect the Right Equipment Data

It is integral to set the right due date and time, which is usually the end date and time of the reservation. Like the reservation, the equipment checkout should have an assigned person for the usage. If you work as a system administrator, you’re probably aware of how important it is to simplify your checkout and reservation. From media inventory to warehousing, you can use an automated tool to make sure equipment checkout supports your equipment reservation approach.

6. Adapt a Restorative Strategy for ALL Equipment Items

You need to roll out an effective restorative strategy for your equipment items. And that means checking and marketing each equipment item on a separate checkout list. This simplified mechanism will also make sure that each equipment item is returned on time.

You should only process and return your equipment items when you mark the entire checkout list as complete. Realistically, mark the entry so that you can easily check whether or not each item is checked in the system. Consequently, it will make it easier to find and make follow-ups with overdue checkouts.

7. Consider Equipment Damage 

Equipment items are bound to get a series of damages over time. In fact, the more you use a specific piece of equipment, the higher number of damages it will incur. So, make sure to address and fix existing damages and take into account potential damages beforehand. You can also conduct consistent inspections and send out personalized reminders to fix or avoid equipment damages.

Like a calendar list, keep a separate list for damages and issues of each equipment item. Once you check in damaged items, make sure to add an entry to the issue list. This entry should describe the nature and severity of the damage, a fixed due date, and a proper checkout reference. After the issue is resolved, mark the issue record as fixed. Later on, it will be easier to make follow-ups for unfixed items.

What about Using and Maintaining Software Equipment?

You can use automated checkout and reservation to manage and maintain your equipment items. One of the perks of using software equipment tools is that it centralizes your operations and makes your operations efficient. Plus, automated software equipment tools come with tracking features and support and resolve equipment compliance issues easily. 

Final Thoughts

In essence, there are no shortcuts and it all boils down to adopting a robust strategy to maintain your equipment. In the quest to make a proper strategy, write down the machines that require regular servicing after every week or month. 

Outline the maintenance processes and ensure safety measures to make the right moves. You should also note down the external or outsourced maintenance resources to get further assistance. In fact, useful insights from maintenance resources will influence more growth for your business.

Again, preparation is the key, and making actionable equipment reports can make all the difference. As long as you address regular issues and hurdles of equipment maintenance, you’re on the right track. In the grand scheme of things, make sure to embrace new equipment maintenance practices to lower production costs and maintain high operational efficiency.

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