Heavy Equipment Maintenance: How Can It Make or Break Your Business’s Operational Efficiency and Speed?

Now that you have heavy equipment carrying out specialized tasks for your business, caring about them and keeping every single part in their peak condition is one of your sole responsibilities. But before that, what exactly classifies machinery as heavy-duty equipment? Is it just the overall weight or the complicated mechanics? Truth be told, the term “heavy-duty” in the machinery world is more associated with the special tasks that the equipment units are meant to perform rather than focusing on their weights. From earthmoving equipment like excavators and bulldozers to construction machinery like modular transporters and steer skid loaders, they are all classified under the heavy-duty family.

Comprising of pneumatics, electronics, and hydraulic parts working coordinately to perform the designated tasks, these machinery items are subjected to regular wear and tear and corrosion. If not maintained properly over time, they can soon lose their structural integrity, thereby leading to reduced operational efficiency and increased chances of workplace injuries. Having said that, we have prepared a comprehensive guide on heavy equipment maintenance so that you can acknowledge its importance and prepare a full-scale maintenance routine following our illustrations.

Why Is Proactive Maintenance Routine Necessary for Heavy Equipment?

Calling for maintenance service for heavy equipment pieces upon their sudden breakdowns or significant efficiency reduction can incur colossal expenses on operators. Besides, delayed maintenance could render the machinery ineffective and unfit for further utilization. In some cases, the damage caused to the equipment parts is so huge that repairing becomes impossible and you may have to invest in a new purchase. All these scenarios are indeed worrisome and if not addressed beforehand could lead to huge cost structures and untimely equipment failure due to poor maintenance cycles. So, below we have illustrated a few reasons that make proactive maintenance routine extremely necessary for heavy equipment. 

Maintaining Peak Performance

Most heavy-duty equipment units nowadays are manufactured with advanced technologies and complex mechanics, including a combination of hydraulics, electronics, and pneumatics. A proactive maintenance routine ensures these components remain at their peak conditions and continue to deliver optimal performance for years to come. It also protects the vulnerable parts from frequent wear and tear and corrosion. 

Enhanced Safety

Using heavy equipment units that are not maintained periodically drastically increases the chances of workplace mishaps and personnel injuries. Rusted mechanical parts, poor pneumatics, and improper functioning of the hydraulic pistons and chambers can easily lead to sudden accidents when overworked. Hence, personnel in charge of equipment handling and operation will be put at huge risk of bodily injuries. Owing to this, implementing a proactive maintenance routine for heavy machinery is of utmost importance and shouldn’t be branded as an option rather than a necessity. 

Reduced Unexpected Breakdowns

Unexpected machinery breakdown incurs heavy financial losses for companies, leading to missed deadlines, poor deliveries, and declining client satisfaction. Besides, it also disrupts regular business operations, causing employee dissatisfaction with zero output. These chokepoints can be easily avoided with a proactive maintenance routine for heavy equipment as it prevents sudden and untimed breakdowns of the mechanical and electronic parts. A planned maintenance routine won’t disrupt any business operation and can help in preplanning the availability of resources to tackle any emergency. 

Extended Equipment Longevity

The design lifecycle of every heavy equipment is preplanned and depends on whether regular maintenance is properly being carried out or not. If attention is not given to slight reductions in operational efficiency, wear and tear of the mechanical parts, and other minute issues beforehand, these can soon escalate to a point where the equipment gets rendered unfit for further use. To prevent this, it’s better and feasible in terms of monetary investments and business efficiency to plan a proactive maintenance routine. 

How to Create a Proactive Heavy-Duty Equipment Maintenance Program?

The below illustration will give you a detailed walkthrough of a heavy equipment maintenance routine to add more value to your business operations and process output. 

Step 1: Choose a Pivot Point

If you have never implemented a maintenance routine for heavy-duty equipment units, it’s better to establish a pivot around a single piece of machinery. Upon its success, you can use the same template for the entire machinery fleet to reduce cost expenses and increase the overall success rate. To choose the best pivot machinery piece for the comprehensive maintenance plan, check the criteria below. 

1. The equipment’s optimal performance is crucial for carrying out critical business operations. 
2. It will need an intensive maintenance routine.
3. The chances of sudden breakdowns and failure rates are quite high for the chosen equipment unit. 

Step 2: Analyzing Previous Operational Routine 

The key to making the maintenance routine a success is to determine the crucial parameters for quantifying the improvement in equipment’s performance and operation. And to prepare the parameter checklist, you need to evaluate the equipment’s historical performance, past maintenance routines if any, and data charts about the operator’s use. This will help you to define the parameters that will help you evaluate the success rate of the proactive maintenance cycle to be implemented and quantify the improvements accurately and with precision. 

Step 3: Management of Spare Parts, Special Tooling, and Consumables 

Maintenance of heavy equipment doesn’t only involve evaluating its performance and detecting the underlying defects threatening the operational efficiency and design lifecycle. Instead, it primarily focuses on repairing the damaged parts, lubricating the mechanical components, replacing the worn-out components, and many more. Hence, you need a complete list of special tools, spare parts, and other consumables ready before the maintenance tasks can commence. Some of these elements might already be available in your inventory while others might have to be bought or rented from a third-party company. 

Step 4: Decide the Management Program

Using the acquired datasets properly will drastically increase the success of your maintenance plans and guarantee the timely completion of the tasks without much of a hassle. For this, you could choose to use a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) over manual spreadsheets and charts to monitor the data and capture the maintenance results. Such software not only paves the way for process automation but also comes with advanced analytical tools to gain valuable insights into the maintenance tasks and their results. 

Step 5: Develop an Initial Maintenance Routine

Determining the maintenance frequency is crucial to ensure the machinery is properly handled at periodic intervals without any further issues. For this, you may have to consider a number of external and internal parameters, like equipment utilization hours on a per-day basis, calendar time, miles, and many more. Apart from this, if the pivot equipment has any sensors planted for reading temperatures, vibrations, pressures, and other such intricate parameters, you may have to consider the same to determine the maintenance frequency.

Step 6: Monitor and Scale the Maintenance Cycle for Heavy Equipment

It’s obvious that the first proactive heavy duty maintenance plan will have numerous imperfections and analytical gaps. So, you should continuously monitor the captured data from every task being included in the maintenance routine and compare the same with your expectations. If there is any gap, no matter how sliver it is, you should optimize the routine further to prevent any mishap later on. 

Step 7: Roll Out the Maintenance Template for Other Machinery Units

After the initial maintenance plan for the pivot machinery piece is successful and has been optimized properly based on the gathered results, you can plan to roll out the same across your entire fleet.

Conclusion

In this comprehensive guide, we have explained the necessity of planning a proactive heavy equipment maintenance routine and its step-by-step conception. Based on our explanations, you can decide if you would like to bear the heavy monetary liabilities and workflow disruptions caused by neglected machinery maintenance or invest in a proactive plan beforehand.