Tips for Preserving and Maintaining Your Facility

Day after day, machinery and equipment in any industry’s facilities work long and hard hours. Eventually, with wear and tear, the machines will begin to break down. However, you can prevent degradation by taking the time to maintain and care for your machinery. To extend the lifespan of your facility’s equipment, you should follow a few of these tips for preserving and maintaining your facility.

Understand Your Materials

It’s important to understand what your equipment, tools, and machinery are made of in order to give the best possible care. For example, many facilities make heavy use of aluminum and stainless steel because they’re incredibly strong and possess a natural resistance to corrosion. This makes them less needy, but remember that it doesn’t make them invulnerable.

There are different ways aluminum and stainless steel materials can fail if you do not perform routine maintenance, and that includes consistent cleaning. Other materials, like wood, are prone to rot and decay in moist environments, so you need to ensure wooden materials are kept safe and dry.

By understanding what materials your facility uses, you’ll be able to fine-tune your maintenance to suit that material.

Create a Paper Trail

One of the best tips for preserving and maintaining your facility is to create a physical paper trail of your efforts. This includes checklists and other schedules to ensure everything gets done, but it also includes documenting work orders and maintenance reports so you can easily recall and share what issues have been addressed. You don’t want to accidentally skip out on preventative maintenance practices because you thought you did them.

Daily Maintenance

This one is perhaps the most obvious, but it’s worth stressing that it’s crucial to develop a daily maintenance schedule. Because it will feel secondary to the day-to-day operations of your actual business, it may seem like it’s no big deal to skip maintenance now and then, but that just creates an opportunity for corrosion or damage to occur or worsen.