Planned maintenance – it’s something we do in various aspects of our lives without even giving it much thought. For instance, we plan to clean out the gutters of our homes each fall, because we know that a clogged gutter can lead to overflowing water that can pool at the foundation of your home, creating a high potential for flooding.  Nobody likes to clean out gutters, but it’s a preventative measure, and it’s vastly superior to cleaning them out as a reactive measure after the harm has already been done.

So when it comes to the machinery and equipment in your warehouse or facility, why would you act any different? Let’s look at loading docks. The average dock leveler sees nearly 100,000 crossings by forklifts each year. That’s a lot of wear and tear on the levelers, vehicle restraints and dock doors. All this activity can eventually lead to breakdowns from time-to-time, but if you wait for something to go wrong then you run the risk of experiencing unnecessary downtime. This simply means wasted time and less production that hits your bottom line, not to mention the safety risks from breakdowns that can include trailer tip-over, early departure and trailer creep, amongst others.

Planned Maintenance Programs:

Now, if you treated your machinery and equipment like you do your gutters, then you could prevent these potentially costly and dangerous circumstances. A great way to implement this is with a Planned Maintenance Programs, or PMP. Through a PMP, the company will get regular maintenance checkups and repairs from trained technicians rather than in-house maintenance workers that may not be experts on the different equipment.

PMPs generally start with a free facility survey. The survey acts as a starting point for the PMP provider and the facility manager to determine the state of the equipment and what type of program is needed. Depending on the needs of your facility, PMP inspections can be scheduled monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or yearly. Overtime, the familiarity of the facility improves scheduling and increases the efficiency of your facility maintenance and allows technicians to red flag and monitor any equipment that may not demonstrate any immediate symptoms.

So next time a piece of equipment breaks down or is in need of repair, think about your gutters, because we all know that preventing a mess is always better than cleaning it up.  

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