Helpful Summary
Overview: We offer an essential guide on implementing effective asset maintenance strategies to ensure operational efficiency and prolong the lifespan of your business assets. We cover key strategies, including preventive, corrective, and predictive maintenance among others, each tailored to specific asset needs to minimize risks and downtime.
Why You Can Trust Us: As providers of asset management solutions ourselves, we have an in-depth understanding of the needs, challenges, and solutions within this space. Our diverse clientele–including prominent organizations such as Unilever, Pfizer, and Greenpeace–have witnessed significant reductions in unplanned downtime and maintenance costs.
Why It Matters: Effective asset maintenance is crucial for minimizing operational disruptions and reducing the likelihood of costly repairs and legal issues due to workplace accidents. It helps maintain a safe, efficient, and financially sound workplace.
Action Points: We advise selecting the appropriate asset management tool and strategy that fits your specific needs. Incorporate regular maintenance checks, keep detailed records, and ensure all team members are trained on proactive maintenance practices.
Further Research: To complement your knowledge, explore our blog for more expert knowledge, best practices, and industry trends in the asset management space.
Your assets are crucial to your business's operational efficiency. If they’re not in optimal condition, this can greatly impact your business output and financially cost you.
Therefore, businesses need to establish processes to ensure downtime is minimized to the bare minimum or completely eliminated. Thankfully, this can be achieved with structured and functional asset maintenance practices in place.
In this BlueTally guide, we explore the importance of asset maintenance, the six different types of asset maintenance strategies, and some valuable tips to help you perform effective asset maintenance.
Why Listen To Us?
At BlueTally, we understand the challenges in managing asset maintenance effectively. Our solution has a proven track record of significantly supporting businesses in reducing unplanned downtime and maintenance costs.
Our cloud-based nature, SOC 2 compliance, practical experience, and industry insight have satisfied leading brands with a global presence, including Pfizer, Unilever, and Vodafone.
Our users experience real-time tracking and decreased errors, contributing to overall cost savings and improved asset management workflows.
What is Asset Maintenance?
Asset maintenance refers to the practices undertaken to preserve an organization’s assets and ensure they remain in the best working condition for as long as possible. With the right asset maintenance practice in place, business assets can work continuously, ensuring your overall operations are not affected.
Asset maintenance can be considered a broad strategy consisting of several sub-activities carried out at specific times to ensure your business assets remain in great shape. Depending on the asset in question, asset maintenance could involve regular inspections, servicing, or repairs that require short downtime to prevent a more lengthy downtime due to a major fault.
There are six different types of asset maintenance strategies you can take on:
- Preventive Maintenance
- Corrective Maintenance
- Predictive Maintenance
- Condition-Based Maintenance
- Reliability-Centered Maintenance
- Total Productive Maintenance
Each of these forms of maintenance is designed to address specific asset needs and ultimately minimize the risk of downtime. Therefore, you should adopt the right approach that fits your unique assets.
Why is Asset Maintenance Important?
Asset maintenance helps an organization ensure operational efficiency and consistency. It can also contribute to workplace safety and financial health in the long run.
With the proper maintenance strategy, your business assets can run smoothly, and you can eliminate the risk of downtime. Additionally, maintaining an asset significantly lowers the risk of sudden malfunction, making it more reliable and safer.
For instance, a technology company's servers not being regularly maintained (e.g., updating software, replacing faulty hardware, optimizing storage) can lead to system downtime or data loss, disrupting business operations and affecting customer experience.
Not having a solid asset maintenance plan may lead your business to face certain consequences. These include unexpected breakdowns affecting production, higher repair expenses, and unsafe work environments. However, manually creating an effective asset maintenance plan may prove difficult, especially for large organizations with hundreds of assets.
Fortunately, you can simplify the process using a reliable asset management tool.
For instance, BlueTally streamlines your asset maintenance process by automating daunting manual tasks like tracking uptime, maintenance scheduling, reporting, asset history, and more in one place. This allows you to implement effective asset maintenance strategies with minimal stress.
Using BlueTally helps organizations:
- Effectively manage asset depreciation.
- Extend the lifespan of aging assets.
- Reduce unexpected breakdowns and emergency repairs.
- Improve workplace health and safety.
- Enhance asset overall performance and reliability.
6 Different Types of Asset Maintenance Strategies
Let's take a closer look at each of the different types of asset maintenance strategies:
1. Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance focuses on regular asset inspections and repairs to prevent issues or failures from developing. It follows specific routines and consistently monitors the assets to perform the right activities at the right time.
Following the procedure with diligence ensures that your assets remain in top condition, extending their lifecycles and avoiding costs associated with unexpected breakdowns. It also positively impacts your organization’s finances in the long term.
Different types of preventative maintenance include:
- Time-Based Maintenance (TBM): This type of preventive maintenance is scheduled at regular intervals, like the annual calibration of diagnostic machines, for example. This approach ensures consistent performance but can sometimes lead to unnecessary service if no issues are present.
- Failure-Finding Maintenance: For failure-finding maintenance, personnel regularly inspect hidden safety systems like backup generators or emergency equipment to uncover potential problems before they're needed in critical situations.
- Usage-Based Maintenance (UBM): This relies on actual usage data, such as hours of operation or the number of patient scans in a hospital, to schedule maintenance. This method ensures that heavily used equipment like MRI machines receives appropriate upkeep without over-servicing.
2. Corrective Maintenance
Corrective maintenance is performed to repair a faulty asset after a failure. Using this maintenance approach, the asset is run until it breaks down, after which it is restored. Corrective maintenance is also referred to as reactive maintenance.
Corrective maintenance procedures are mostly initiated when a problem is discovered during a separate work order. For example, a corrective maintenance engineer might discover an issue during an emergency repair. The corrective maintenance for that issue is then scheduled for a later time.
3. Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance takes a different approach. It leverages data monitoring and analysis to predict asset failures before they occur. This way, a business can improve its asset conditions and operational performance by preventing downtime with informed data and timely interventions.
Trenitalia, an Italian train operator, is an excellent example of a company that successfully practices predictive maintenance. The company implemented predictive maintenance by equipping its trains with sensors that monitor parts like brake pads in near-real time. This proactive maintenance approach decreased downtime by 5-8% and reduced annual maintenance costs by around $100 million, all while improving on-time train performance and customer satisfaction.
4. Condition-Based Maintenance
In this type of maintenance, the exact condition of the asset is monitored to decide what exact maintenance needs to be done. With Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM), actions are only carried out when a specific indicator shows a depreciating performance or pending failure.
These indicators may include programmed monitoring, non-invasive measurements, visual inspection and observation, scheduled tests, and performance data. The condition data can be gathered at specific intervals or continuously depending on the monitoring parameter.
5. Reliability-Centered Maintenance
Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) adopts a priority-based approach to save resources. It focuses on identifying the most cost-effective maintenance practices on an asset and prioritizes them. Decisions are made by analyzing key information like asset failure modes, functions, and the impact of failure.
This information helps businesses determine the most economical maintenance procedure without compromising an asset’s overall health and preventing downtimes.
6. Total Productive Maintenance
This type of maintenance is practiced by encouraging and cultivating a company-wide engagement in maintenance. Total Productive maintenance (TPM) requires cooperation from everyone in the organization at every level, who are taught both proactive and preventive maintenance strategies depending on the role they are required to play.
This type of maintenance aims to improve overall asset productivity by optimizing asset availability in a quest for perfect production. It achieves this by using software, equipment, employees, and other processes to maintain and improve the integrity of the asset.
10 Tips for Effective Asset Maintenance
An asset maintenance plan refers to the strategies and procedures associated with keeping your assets in optimal condition throughout their lifespan. Your organization should have an asset maintenance plan that spells out key details like when, where, and what work should be done on each asset at every point in time to keep it in the best condition throughout its lifecycle.
A good asset maintenance plan is well structured and clearly outlines how your organization will manage and maintain its physical assets. This includes inspections, repair schedules, part replacements, budgeting information, previous records, resource allocation, and more.
Here are our 10 tips for effective asset maintenance management:
1. Select the Right Asset Management Tool
Firstly, you need to select the right asset maintenance tool to enhance your management process. The right tool will simplify your asset maintenance process by automating manual processes.
With the right asset management software, you can easily create an asset library that anyone can access to get information about an asset or manage an asset license. BlueTally is an excellent example of such software.
With BlueTally you can monitor and document data about all your assets in one place. Here are some of our tools most notable features:
- Ease of use: BlueTally is designed to be user-friendly, with an intuitive interface that simplifies asset management. This feature is crucial for reducing the learning curve and improving user adoption rates across departments.
- Comprehensive asset tracking: Enables organizations to monitor all aspects of their assets efficiently. It includes tracking the location, status, and history of each asset, ensuring that all information is up-to-date and easily accessible.
- Schedule asset audits and maintenance: Allows for the scheduling of regular audits and maintenance checks to ensure assets are in good working condition. This proactive approach helps prevent equipment failures and extends the lifespan of assets by addressing issues before they escalate.
- Checkout history and detailed changelog: This functionality records every transaction related to the assets, including checkouts, returns, and maintenance activities. It provides a detailed log of who used what asset, when, and under what conditions, enhancing accountability and transparency.
- Asset barcodes: Supports the use of barcodes and QR codes for assets, facilitating quick and accurate tracking and management. Scanning these codes can instantly bring up all relevant information about an asset, streamlining processes like audits, maintenance, and inventory checks.
- Asset depreciation: Automatically calculates depreciation for assets, which is essential for accurate financial reporting and compliance. It helps organizations understand the value of their assets over time and plan budgeting and replacement cycles effectively.
- Detailed reporting: Comprehensive reporting tools that generate detailed insights into asset utilization, maintenance schedules, depreciation, and more. These reports are invaluable for strategic planning and decision-making.
- Customizability: Our system is highly customizable, allowing organizations to tailor features to their specific needs. This includes custom fields, statuses, and workflows, ensuring that the asset management system aligns perfectly with the organization's operational requirements.
Feel free to take a look at our Best Practices for Deploying Asset Management Software for your organization.
2. Build a Database of the Assets that Require Maintenance
Creating a comprehensive database of all your assets is a crucial first step in enhancing your asset maintenance activities. An asset register helps store key information about each asset in one central location, facilitating efficient maintenance and management.
Asset registers can streamline maintenance by keeping detailed records of each asset, including asset labels, user manuals, descriptions, and maintenance history. This centralized database ensures that maintenance teams have immediate access to all the information they need, which helps in planning and executing maintenance tasks efficiently.
BlueTally simplifies the process of building an asset database with its intuitive platform. You can compile and organize essential asset data like labels, user manuals, descriptions, and more in one central, easily accessible location.
You can quickly add and categorize assets while attaching relevant documents for easy reference. Additionally, features like asset barcodes make it effortless to label and update your physical assets. With everything centralized, clients and staff can swiftly access vital information, ensuring efficient maintenance and management.
3. Gather the Right Asset Data - Historical and Current Conditions
Effective asset maintenance is possible when you know the right activities to perform at the right time. The easiest way to achieve this is by having the right data to make an informed decision. By tracking the right data, you can stay updated on asset performance and gather relevant analytics to inform your maintenance activities.
BlueTally’s checkout history and detailed changelog feature provides comprehensive tracking of asset usage and modifications. This feature logs every instance an asset is checked in or out, detailing who used it and when. Additionally, it records all changes made to asset data, such as status updates and maintenance activities.
Preventive maintenance is generally more effective than reactive maintenance and should be your default approach. Understanding an asset's uniqueness and lifecycle helps determine when to perform timely preventive maintenance, ensuring optimal performance and longevity.
4. Outline Each Asset's Purpose and Level of Importance
An asset's purpose and level of importance should always be visible for easy prioritization. It aids in better decision-making by clearly letting all stakeholders know how important the asset is to the business’s overall operation and performance. This way, everyone is immediately aware of the potential impacts of when the asset is down.
The data is also key for building an asset maintenance schedule. Key factors include how long the maintenance will take, when it will take place, and the cost implication of the downtime.
5. Assign Values to Your Assets
The value of an asset informs decisions in key areas, such as how much you are willing to spend on the maintenance budget and the cost of repair versus the cost of replacement. A valuable asset should also be prioritized when designing maintenance schedules.
6. Choose a Suitable Maintenance Strategy
As we’ve seen, several maintenance strategies exist, such as preventive, corrective, predictive maintenance, and more. The best strategy for your asset depends on several factors and the type of asset in question.
After selecting a maintenance strategy, you need to consider different types of actions under that strategy. If you choose a preventive maintenance plan, for example, you have to decide on the type of maintenance strategy to adopt, e.g., time-based, failure-finding, or usage-based maintenance. You must also set a clear line of tasks to carry out the maintenance, provide spare parts, allocate who will work on it, and set an asset downtime window.
7. Monitor Asset Performance
Continuously monitoring asset performance is key to effective asset maintenance once a plan is in place. This singular act paints a clear picture of whether the asset management plan is working or not. You can measure performance by comparing the performance data and condition of an asset after a few maintenance cycles. Another good performance indication is the cost incurred regarding repairs and breakdowns.
Tesla, the electric car company, is an example of a company that largely monitors asset performance and data to address maintenance. It uses AI algorithms to analyze data from production equipment. This analysis helps Tesla proactively address potential equipment issues before they lead to downtime, ensuring high productivity and minimal disruptions
8. Set Reminders for Audits & Maintenance
Reminders for asset maintenance and audits keep track of the asset schedule, informing you of when it's time to run maintenance on an asset.
With its robust asset maintenance tracking system, BlueTally lets you keep track of any upcoming audits of your assets, as well as schedule them yourself. You will also receive notifications when audits are overdue and keep track of maintenance carried out on the assets in the same way.
9. Monitor Asset Depreciation
Every asset will face depreciation at some point, and you should be able to track it over time to make informed decisions. An asset may depreciate to a point where purchasing a new one might be more economically reasonable than a repair.
BlueTally automatically calculates the depreciation of your assets and licenses based on straight-line depreciation. You can see the depreciation from each asset’s overview or use the Depreciation Report to get a full financial overview of all your assets.
10. Integrate with the Right Platforms
By integrating with compatible platforms, organizations can centralize asset data for better visibility, reducing the need to manually collate information from different sources.
BlueTally seamlessly integrates with several platforms, including Azure Active Directory, Intune, Jamf, Okta, Slack, and more. You can also integrate it into your existing technology infrastructure and workflows via our flexible API. Read more about our integrations here.
Achieve Effective Asset Maintenance With BlueTally
An asset’s lifespan is extended when maintained properly, ensuring it provides as much value as possible before it declines. By following the 10 tips discussed in this article, you can set up a structure that encourages effective asset maintenance in your organization. Having the right asset management software may be the difference between having an optimal-performing asset and not.
Get the right software solution to manage all aspects of your business assets and maintenance schedules effectively. Try BlueTally now for free.
