Maintenance Planning For Small Businesses
Whether you have experience in manufacturing, big data, or the military, maintenance is a major part of keeping powerful and vital systems in working order. For the biggest companies and organizations, there are entire departments, commands, and even contracting companies dedicated to simply maintaining a component of a larger business or mission. That doesn't mean small business can get away with just fixing issues as they appear. Here are a few issues that may come up for smaller businesses without a proper maintenance plan, along with ways to work an efficient cmms software maintenance plan into place without hiring half of the US Navy's engineering sailors.
Computer Systems Failure And Data Loss
Does your business rely on a set of workstations, mobile devices, or a server? When a system goes down, it means that a worker may be unable to complete their task or that their work will be slowed down while switching to another system.
What happens if the issue is a physical part failure? Can you be sure that the issue is just a one-off problem, or do you have a problematic brand inside your systems? Part of maintenance planning goes beyond cleaning and checking for damage; you need to track the parts that have failed you.
Continuing with the computer example, a few of the most commonly replaced parts are the power supply, the storage drive, and the optical drive. Each component has a short enough lifecycle with noticeable wear and tear that anyone who pays attention to the systems for more than 2 years will notice problems.
When these systems fail multiple times, you may need to recover data multiple times. There is always a chance that a drive may fail with some data or all data unrecoverable, or the entire system may suffer stress from a severe failure.
Have a plan for not only maintenance and repair, but backing up information and protecting assets that were at risk, but didn't fail this time.
Information Reporting Can Boost Your Device Performance
Instead of just removing the component and adding in another, you need to record what happened. Write down the brand, part number, serial number, type of failure, installation date, and failure date.
With this information, you have the power to buy better parts and get better service. You can either compare the maintenance results against your company's past performance records, or compare with other customers across the internet. You can even submit the data to the manufacturer, as a trend of failure that doesn't meet their advertisement expectations could result in free or discounted parts, or a revision to their tech with your helpful information.