Downtime is caused by some unexpected event that stops business productivity for a specific span of time. You are likely to have faced it at least once if you are in a business that involves a lot of equipment and tools. The reasons for downtime can be plenty. It might be due to a malfunctioning hardware unit, an operating error or even poor maintenance.
Regardless of the cause, it is essential to make it work and get the business operations on the road as soon as possible when downtime occurs. Downtime will seriously affect the profits and productivity of a business if not taken care of as soon as possible. If you want to know some of the best ways to reduce downtime of business equipment, then keep reading the article.
Conduct a risk audit
Conducting a risk audit is one of the best ways to reduce the downtime of your business equipment as it will definitely help you understand in advance the tools and equipment that is going to fail your business operations in the future due to unexpected downtime. Most of the companies use the latest and best technologies for their control systems but use very old equipment as far as hardware is concerned.
This is where everything will go down. Spare parts of such old equipment will become unavailable or inaccessible or may need to be ordered from another country which will add a huge amount of expenses to business costs. Thus, it is always a good idea to perform risk analysis to eliminate the usage of old and rotten equipment.
Train the employees well
Many a time, operating errors are the reasons for the failure of business equipment and tools. To ensure that this does not happen, you have to have well-trained staff, look after your machinery and tools, and get asset tags with qr code to protect your assets and optimize business productivity. A properly trained and empowered workforce is an asset to your business in more than one way.
If your employees are properly trained, they will be able to operate the business tolls and equipment more efficiently to keep the business operations running smoothly. They will also be able to identify if something is not working right in the equipment and get the necessary repairs done. Organize employee training sessions in order to make employees use the business tools more effectively and to reduce downtime.
Understand the problem and why it happened
Knowing about your business equipment and tools in depth is the best way to stay on top of your business assets and their performance. If you have this knowledge, you can understand the fault and why the fault occurred. It will also help you evaluate the OEE (overall equipment effectiveness). You have several business tools available which will help you with this.
A computerized maintenance management system or CMMS software is one of them. It will help you keep track of your assets’ history, and all the details regarding them like their recent breakdowns and maintenance schedule, etc. You can easily analyse this data to find out what happened to the equipment and what should be done in order to prevent such issues in the future.
Final words
The steps mentioned above will definitely help you maintain your equipment in good shape and reduce their downtime. Combine them with a good maintenance strategy and schedule and always keep track of your equipment lifetime to get the best out of your business assets and to reduce downtime.
