Equipment maintenance and repair costs can really eat into your revenue. Well-maintained equipment will break down less frequently, have a lower total cost of ownership, and provide a higher resale value.
Minimize maintenance and repair costs and improve your equipment’s longevity by taking four easy steps.
1. It all starts with daily walkarounds
Your equipment operators have eyes on the company’s equipment more so than any other employee. Use their daily contact to gather equipment status data.
Instruct equipment operators to walk around the machine they operate at the start and the end of each shift. Provide them with a checklist and require them to report machine health and damage at the start of their shift.
A digital checklist is far superior to paper copies, which can be misplaced, filled out incorrectly, take a longer time to reach the desk of the equipment manager, and create duplicate work.
There are also benefits to performing a walkaround at the end of the day as well. If you find an issue at the end of the day, you can make arrangements to deal with it, such as staying on site longer to fix it, coming in earlier the next day to fix it, or making arrangements for a new machine. Early issue detection allows for more options to address the issue and it decreases downtime.
2. Improve operator performance
Although daily walkarounds provide important machine health data, how a machine is operated will greatly influence maintenance and repair requirements (and therefore costs).
Each machine has limits. If you push a machine to its limits, this will cause excess wear on relevant components. Greater wear increases machine maintenance costs and the amount of time the machine will need to be repaired (thereby decreasing a machine’s annual working hours).
Also, many machines come equipped with settings so the operator can optimize machine performance to the application. For example, many machines have power modes, so it can give you a lot of power when you need it, but the machine also provides an Eco mode for travel and light work, which will have less impact and wear on the engine.
In addition, instruct your operators to report any irregular machine behavior — performance issues, sounds, smells, etc. If the machine comes equipped with telematics, the telematics system will detect numerous machine malfunctions and alert both the operator and the equipment manager.
If you teach your operators how to use the telematics interface within the machine and what the most prominent fault codes and warnings are, the operator can then asses what to do next. This empowers them to do something about it other than call the equipment manager and wait for them to tell the operator what to do.
3. Use telematics to improve machine health
A lot of machine health information can be relayed to the equipment manager through the use of telematics technology.
“Your fleet of excavators, compact loaders, and other equipment is most productive when operating optimally. But how do you know if they are?” Asks Logan Little, Senior Marketing Specialist for Doosan Bobcat. “Telematic services like Bobcat’s Machine IQ works wirelessly to connect fleet managers, operators, and customers to their machine’s information from a mobile device or desktop.”
Machine IQ, launched in 2019 in North America, allows connected-machine owners to monitor the health of their Bobcat machine and remotely track information that enhances maintenance, security, and performance.
With easy access to critical information like fault code notifications, utilization reports about performance, and fleet-level reporting – you can holistically monitor and anticipate issues to mitigate potential downtime and lost opportunity. Thanks to wireless connectivity, this enhanced level of engagement and monitoring is possible without the need for manual on-site assessments or disruptions to work time.
4. Practice proactive equipment maintenance
When a machine breaks down in the field, it can be costly, so you want to avoid the work stoppage and increased costs caused by downtime.
If you keep track of maintenance, you can schedule your compact equipment for maintenance before there’s an issue in the field. This allows you to eliminate component-failure-related downtime and to schedule maintenance at a time when the machine isn’t needed.
“The importance of maintenance interval tracking cannot be understated,” says Little. “Staying on top of regularly planned maintenance can significantly improve the longevity of your machines, which results in cost-savings for your business. This type of data can be used to detect machine issues early to reduce repair costs. You can also compare operation and productivity of equipment and fleets from day to day, which allows you to see idle times, track potential operator misuse, or identify a service or parts issue before it becomes a larger problem.”
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