While people sometimes consider preventive maintenance for heavy equipment to be a burdensome expenditure of time, money, and resources, that’s the wrong way to look at it. This attitude tends to come from people a little newer to dealing with construction machinery.
Those who’ve been around a bit longer have seen what happens to neglected equipment. In contrast, they’ve (hopefully) also seen the performance and lifespan differences in machines that are kept up properly over the years.
Preventive maintenance is in fact an investment in safety, efficiency, cost-efficiency, and productivity. And it’s a smart one that does indeed deliver a return on your investment. Once you see it this way, choosing to be proactive about caring for your heavy equipment—itself a major investment—and keeping up with the manufacturer-recommended maintenance schedule is an easy call.
Benefits of Preventive Maintenance for Construction Machinery
There are lots of reasons to enact a serious preventive maintenance regimen and schedule. For example, it:
- Protects workers by helping ensure continuing safe operations
- Keeps machinery running at peak performance levels
- Minimizes fuel consumption and other power costs
- Maximizes efficiency and uptime
- Catches problems early, resulting in faster, easier, cheaper repairs and replacements
- Prevents small issues with components from affecting entire systems, again sparing you from costlier fixes and more downtime
- Helps keep projects on schedule
- Extends the life of heavy equipment significantly, reducing replacement costs
- Demonstrates corporate responsibility in the eyes of employees, clients, and potential clients
- Boosts profits in the long run
Key Areas of Preventive Maintenance for Heavy Equipment
A robust regimen of preventive maintenance is more than just regular servicing, and includes a variety of careful planning and care, such as:
- Purchasing or renting the right equipment for each application
- Adequately training operators to properly use all machine controls, modes, and technology
- Making sure all operators understand and adhere to all machine limitations
- Ensuring responsible parties regularly and properly clean, inspect, and adjust equipment and components
- Following fluid management best practices for all heavy equipment
- Strictly sticking to the OEM recommended service schedule
- Completing any and all repairs or part replacements at the first sign of needing them
- Maintaining an appropriately sized fleet for your needs
Take Advantage of Telematics
Today’s advanced telematics systems make keeping up with preventive maintenance much simpler. For example, heavy equipment from Trekker is remotely monitored by SiteWatch or Hi-Mate wireless monitoring systems.
These offer a lot of benefits, including a number related to preventive maintenance. They provide performance data and machine health monitoring that makes developing issues evident, and it tracks each machine’s usage and maintenance schedule, even sending reminders about needed service. Trekker’s technicians are immediately alerted to equipment problems and can remotely run diagnostics to show up to your site fully prepared to address them.
Buying or renting heavy equipment with a state-of-the-art telematics system is a smart way to make preventive maintenance a well-integrated, hassle-free part of operations.
