Sick of putting out fires? Prevent these 3 scenarios with proactive maintenance

Imagine taking your car in for service. You do so in order to replace things before they fail – not when. By taking these actions, you reduce future unplanned downtime and risks associated with operating faulty equipment. The same goes for running a heavy industry site. In this post, we’re listing three common scenarios where preventive maintenance will save you time and money and make your business more effective.

1. Service on time to avoid the crime

One day, one of the loading shovels at your site starts to have engine issues. Your team takes a look at its service history and notices that it hasn’t been serviced on time. More specifically, the oil hasn’t been replaced according to routine. It’s clear that your staff have been doing the oil change at irregular intervals.

You know for a fact that when you use the same oil in an engine for too long, it’s a recipe for disaster. Apart from engine issues, you’re stuck with unplanned downtime – and all of a sudden you have a double whammy on your hands.

You need to prevent these kinds of mistakes, and one way to do it is through CheckProof. Once you specify servicing details unique to your site or machinery, CheckProof automatically creates a maintenance schedule. The app notifies you each time service is due, and once an employee marks a task as done, it creates a retrigger that notifies you the next time it’s due. By keeping track of service schedules, you can take action before it’s too late.

2. Direct reporting is key for proactive maintenance

You use conveyor belts to move minerals in your quarries. One day, the bearing on the right side of your conveyor belt fails but the left bearing keeps spinning, and the whole instrument is ripped apart.

It turns out that the failure originated from lack of documentation because your facility is using pen and paper to keep your logs, and the problem hadn’t made its way to the responsible manager on time.

That’s where CheckProof comes in. When you raise a deviation in the system, CheckProof sends it straight to the site manager – removing intermediaries and manual logging from the process. When you utilise these functionalities of the app, nothing falls between the cracks.

3. A little elbow grease goes a long way (if regulated correctly)

The machinery on your site is greased at regular intervals to remove friction between parts. Your frontline team does this once a week, which has been working well up until now. But one day, there’s an unplanned breakdown in your facility. A few weeks later, the same thing happens again, and your production comes to a halt again.

It turns out that despite the unplanned downtime, your frontline employees have kept on greasing at regular intervals. Now, your machine is “overgreased” – bursting the sealed bearing containing the oil. The grease picks up grime and dirt and goes through the machinery – resulting in damage.

This is easily preventable. With CheckProof, you can trigger maintenance routines based entirely on uptime or production. In this example, you could’ve avoided overgreasing by setting greasing routines to be done after a certain amount of active operating hours – not at specific intervals.