If you have machinery and equipment in your facility, you will have to maintain it without fail for them to perform optimally. Your maintenance plan must cover different types of preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance that need to be performed on different facilities and equipment. If you are a maintenance plan, you must check if your maintenance plan is doing the job needed and achieving the desired results.

However, no plan can be written in stone. At some point, you will have to revise the plan to make improvements. Let us look at 5 instances when you will have to evaluate and make necessary changes.

When To Evaluate and Make Changes in Maintenance Plan?

  • Plan Cannot Benefit From Technology

If you cannot take advantage of or incorporate the latest technology, then your technicians won’t be as effective as they can be. If they are unable to send work orders or receive maintenance work requests and updates via mail or text, it’s time for CMMS to step in. If the technicians can access work orders in the field, they will make fewer mistakes, save a lot of time and have a faster turn-around.

The facility maintenance software has a lot of features that can be integrated seamlessly with the current and existing technology to manage the facility effectively. For example, you can keep a track of maintenance inventory & supplies and also track inventory costs as it is one of the significant sources of maintenance department expenses.

  • Rising Maintenance Budget Without a Reason

You must be able to reduce expenses in a maintenance budget to achieve profitability. However, if you see the maintenance expenses shoot up without adding any more assets to maintain, it is a matter of concern. Study the final numbers and determine what’s causing the increased costs. If you are overstretched, create a strategy for cost reduction.

  • Cannot Track Actual Costs and Labor Hours

If you manage a large maintenance department, you might have hundreds of work orders coming in each month. This will make it challenging to track material and labor overruns and you may experience budget issues. Implementing computerized maintenance management systems will help you track cost and labor overruns. Moreover, it will allow you to keep tabs on the duration of maintenance tasks. If it’s taking longer than what the actual work order requires, it raises a red flag.

  • Deteriorating Maintenance Plan Health

You want to create a maintenance plan that has optimal performance, but if the plan’s health and performance are constantly deteriorating, it is a sign to bring in CMMS. There may be certain design issues or the implemented plan may not meet its goals, all of which indicate that a new maintenance plan is due.

  • Unsatisfactory Customer Service

Good customer service is critical to every single industry. As a maintenance manager, you must have an idea of the level of satisfaction that the internal or external customers have with the maintenance department. If your customers think the maintenance operations are running smoothly and that the maintenance requests are being handled on time, they will be satisfied. But if they aren’t, you need to dig deep.

Track if your team is paying attention to the customers, how they are handling the requests and if the team is keeping a track of complaints and their status of resolution. Discuss these points in regular meetings and gauge your performance as it will help you understand what changes have to be made to make good customer service even better.

  • Premature or Unexpected Equipment Failure

Every piece of equipment has an approximate replacement date but if you find yourself replacing parts earlier than expected or there are premature equipment failures, it is time to review your plan. You may need to change the audit work procedure and look at the history reports for failure and repairs. Don’t even think of doing it manually as it will be extremely challenging and time-consuming. Asset management software can help you conduct regular audits and get the kind of information you need.

The right maintenance plan can make a difference between boosting profits or the financial statement hitting a red line. We, at NEXGEN, can help you make a tailor-made maintenance plan for your facility by incorporating effective CMMS solutions.