Log Maintenance and Equipment Management: Best Practices
Maintenance spreads across every part of your company’s resources and assets. When finding out about the best practices for maintaining your log and equipment practices, it is important to remember some critical points.
Maintenance management is the systemic approach to identifying a company’s problems and solving it through log maintenance and equipment management.
Log maintenance ultimately ensures that the flow of production is seamless, flawless and efficient. Moreover, it also helps you sort out the equipments effectively. Additionally, companies that need a more in-depth exploration of processes will benefit greatly from the time and efforts towards log maintenance.
Objectives for Log Maintenance and Equipment Management
Usually, any business process has some objectives. This also applies to maintenance management. Log maintenance and equipment management helps many different aspects of inventory. These aspects include, scheduling, budgeting, compliance, safety and optimization. The first objective is budgeting, and maintenance managers will usually work with a limited budget.
A limited resource makes budgeting a key part of log maintenance and equipment management. When there is a greater budget transparency, you have a better potential to utilize the funds that are available. Additionally, scheduling is also a critical practice for log maintenance, despite being a very difficult one. Scheduling between workflow and management requires a very subtle balancing act.
Equipment Maintenance Management Scheduling
Not prioritizing maintenance can quickly throw things off-balance in terms of maintenance and management. Scheduling objective can impact many areas of the company, and scopes way beyond log maintenance and equipment management. Not to mention, a log is usually a track of all the data and inventory laid down on a document.
Equipment Management Compliance
Regulation compliance is also a pivotal part for equipment management. It is very easy to lose track of all the different regulations that you must keep track on. Nonetheless, most of the regulations are not subject to change. This means that you could track them easily without making too much effort. In this instance, you can also utilize tools and software that keep you updated on the information to comply with the regulations.
Equipment Safety
Well maintained equipment log allows workers to optimize their workflows and efficiency. All of which leads to a highly increased company productivity. Since log maintenance and equipment management paves the way for a more systemic approach, the aspect of safety also comes about as a by-product.
What are the types of Maintenance Management?
All maintenance management is not the same, and there are different types of management and business rules that can applicable. When creating a maintenance log, keeping these differences in mind that helps you manage equipment management with much more prowess.
1. Time-Based Maintenance
The first type of maintenance is called preventative maintenance. Time based maintenance is a term that you use to describe all types of maintenance that exists on a calendar. For instance, you can include daily, monthly, weekly tasks as well. This scheduling is one that is fixed and workers have to routinely follow. These are also tasks that go through rigorous reinforcement and checks.
2. Predictive Maintenance
The second type of maintenance is the predictive maintenance. This is a type of condition based maintenance that specially monitors assets by using sensors. From the data that you get from the sensors, you can act accordingly. This practice of log maintenance and equipment management is one that requires you to integrate data analytic technology into your system.
Not only that, it also involves the installation of a thorough and expansive sensor tracking system. By doing so, you can act according to the data driven evaluations when preparing log maintenance. This will help you make decisions that will lead to superior management and maintenance for your company.
3. Corrective Maintenance
This is the simplest type of maintenance management. Another name for this type of maintenance is corrective maintenance. This maintenance is completely reaction based, and it helps workers instantly respond to any breakage or failure. When an asset breaks, this type of maintenance comes into action.
What are the benefits of log maintenance management and equipment management?
General log maintenance and equipment management carries great benefits.
1. Cost Savings
When maintaining your log, you are essentially looking through all the inconsistencies and analyzing all possible delays and additional expenses. This means that there is a major benefit of cost savings. By measuring and analyzing your equipments and assets on a routine basis, you will be able to determine where improvement is required. These costs could be calculated in advance to all the things that have improved assets.
2. Improved Security
Proper maintenance of equipment and properly kept facilities will mean that the chances of accidents will decrease. This is particularly true when it comes to day-to-day activities. Not to mention, once the workplace gets safer and the employees start enjoying proper updated scheduling, they no longer have to worry about safety risks. They can instead work in a safe environment that is free from equipment failure.
A safer environment also translates to a productive environment. This is because workers are able to work in an environment where they are not concerned for their safety. This peace of mind helps them retain their focus on the task at hand, and perform their duties to the best of their ability. Overall increased organization paves the way for increased productivity.
3. Automation
One of the best practices for log maintenance is the involvement of automation technology. When aspects of the maintenance become automated, the chances of human error drastically decreases and this in turn leads to less repair costs.
How to gain Effective Log Analysis and Auditing
Once you have collected log from different sources, you need to know how to utilize them for effective management. In any asset management system, there are some elements that you must. For log maintenance, systems must be efficient. The avoidance policy looks to prevent all failure by adopting a zero tolerance approach.
This is not only unreasonable, but also comes at a great cost. A better approach would be one that is risk-based, and determines which category of maintenance practices need to be applied to each system. All of the practices of risks look at risk as an opportunity for improvement.
The cause, effects and likelihood of adverse events requires a management approach that puts you into the control of all failure. People that are responsible for the functionality of the system must work together and stay engaged with all the processes. They should be included at the earliest stages of the asset management system, and also include an asset pro IT series.
What are the problems with Equipment Management?
It is shocking that many companies and organizations do not even keep a list of the items that they own. Even some of the larger organizations fail to keep track of their logs and equipments, because they do not see the importance of their systems. As a consequence, they face costly repercussions.
For instance, you become unable to fill an order because you do not have the equipment to do the job. You may be buying duplicate items for your equipment to compromise for delays which deeply impact quality. You are wasting money and time in purchasing.
Final Thoughts
Organizations and businesses that do keep track of their logs and equipments are able to be much flexible, profitable and more responsive to their customers. Therefore, maintenance and management is something you must prioritize.