6 Tips To Lower Maintenance Costs Quickly

Maintenance costs can significantly draw on your profits, especially if your business relies heavily on machinery or equipment. However, reducing maintenance costs enables you to pocket more of what you earn and optimize what you spend to get the most out of your equipment. 

The article below explores helpful tips for lowering maintenance costs and increasing profits without sacrificing the optimal performance of your key assets. 

1. Schedule Maintenance Based on Data

The manufacturer's recommendations provide a standard framework when scheduling maintenance for any equipment or machinery. 

However, specific maintenance intervals may vary depending on how often you use that particular machine and which individual components see the most wear. In addition, it’s not always clear what parameters manufacturers use to determine the suggested maintenance intervals, making it challenging to compare use cases and adjust accordingly. 

So, when can you extend maintenance intervals, and when do you risk the consequences of premature or unplanned failure? 

Preventative and predictive maintenance often help establish a balance between what’s recommended and the conditions your machine sees daily until you can shift primarily to predictive maintenance. Tools like condition monitoring and oil analysis can also inform and optimize maintenance intervals.

2. Automate Standardized Tasks

Maintenance schedules incorporate recurring dates and tasks that can easily be automated. For example, completing scheduled maintenance today could trigger an alert to appear in two months, requesting that the same maintenance be performed to ensure optimal performance. 

The same concept extends to scheduling inspections, restocking replacement parts after they’ve been installed, and ordering consumable supplies.

For example, just-in-time (JIT) inventory management practices help companies navigate the fine line between having a shortage of or too much inventory. JIT practices dictate ordering supplies only just before they’re necessary. 

In the context of fleet management, this translates to ordering enough motor oil and filters to perform maintenance on only those trucks scheduled for maintenance, not the entire fleet. 

3. Optimize Supplier Contracts

Maintaining heavy-duty equipment requires partnering with vendors to source replacement parts and fluids. 

Companies can reduce maintenance costs by renegotiating supplier contracts in two ways: purchasing in quantity and combining services. Determining the right path for your business requires evaluating the supplies you need and which contracts are most valuable to your bottom line. 

The key to purchasing maintenance materials in bulk is optimizing quantities based on scheduled maintenance intervals and forecasted needs. Fleet managers can feel safe ordering bulk quantities of a single type of motor oil used among several vehicles, but the same may not apply to fuel pumps or spare tires. 

Companies may also feel safer ordering all or the majority of their supplies from a single vendor if they’ve established and maintained a long-term relationship with that vendor and if it makes sense financially. 

4. Educate and Train Staff

Staff members represent key players in reducing maintenance costs. Proper and safe use of machinery ensures minimal maintenance beyond what’s expected, but an operator’s keen eye can identify a minor issue before it becomes costly. 

Knowledge of a machine’s basic functions can also help operators recognize certain conditions that could put equipment at risk. 

5. Prioritize Maintenance Spending

While it’s impossible to avoid maintenance expenses completely and still run a successful business, evaluating your spending bias can provide insight into ways you can optimize what funds you do spend. 

In other words, how do you determine when to spend money on equipment maintenance and which machines receive priority? Recognizing and adjusting your gauge of urgency in completing maintenance can help you better allocate funds for the best outcome possible. 

Maintenance exists to reduce downtime and keep equipment operating longer, but determining when and how maintenance should occur can prove challenging. Lowering maintenance costs begins with establishing a hierarchy of equipment that dictates which machines receive maintenance first based on their value to the company. 

Maintenance costs should be individually tailored to the components or systems necessary for daily function. 

Take an excavator with a torn operator seat cushion and a leaking hydraulic system. The hydraulic system takes priority where the company’s success and maintenance costs are concerned. 

However, this machine may not see any repairs if it’s not necessary for the season, and another, larger piece of equipment requires even more vital maintenance to keep profits coming in. 

6. Treat the Source, Not the Symptoms

Lowering maintenance costs also requires a view of the bigger picture, not just the granular details. 

For example, reducing the cost of maintaining a machine that constantly overheats requires identifying the source of excessive temperatures. Here, reactive maintenance quickly becomes diagnosing the underlying cause and identifying the corresponding solution. 

Failure modes represent one way of avoiding reactive maintenance by hypothesizing all the ways a machine could fail before any failures have even occurred. 

Identifying these failure points and exploring the root causes helps prevent recurring issues, improves the equipment’s reliability, and reduces unplanned costs due to downtime. Predictive maintenance also relies on failure modes to determine optimal maintenance intervals. 

Best Practices for Cost-Effective Maintenance

Systematically approaching and realizing the results of achieving optimal maintenance costs requires time. 

Reducing waste involves evaluating costs that span from routine repairs and service calls to full replacement and revenue loss due to downtime. Companies often start by investing their efforts in the equipment that costs the most to maintain or performs the most work, but there are other ways of reducing maintenance expenses. 

For example, businesses often overlook the value of outsourcing maintenance protocols in favor of lowering costs by keeping everything in-house. Regardless of the specific circumstances that may apply, limiting the number of assets tied up in maintaining equipment frees up resources that you can deploy elsewhere. 

Below are two examples demonstrating the value of contracting with a third party to address equipment maintenance: 

• Diesel particulate filter: Fleets of heavy-duty trucks rely on diesel particulate filters to meet emissions standards, making experienced diesel technicians a precious resource for fleet managers and owners. 

• Hydraulic mining shovel: Complex mining equipment, such as a hydraulic mining shovel, represents a significant investment that demands the care of a knowledgeable specialist. 

Companies that outsource their maintenance can still perform basic intervals themselves. However, they can reduce costs here by sourcing and installing high-quality replacement parts. Again, there’s a balance between the downtime necessary to make repairs and the upfront cost of better-performing parts with greater longevity. 

Streamline Maintenance With High-Quality Products and Services

Optimizing maintenance expenses can unlock additional funds capable of scaling your business to the next level. Trust the experts at Cadence to support your company’s maintenance needs with superior products and services designed to deliver value at every turn. 

Call us at 336-629-2061 to discover how we can help turn one of your largest expenses into a wise investment. 

Sources: 

What Is Just-In-Time (JIT) Inventory Management? | Business.org

What is FMEA? Failure Mode & Effects Analysis | ASQ

Why Hydraulic Shovels - Mining 780450 | SAE International

Information on Diesel Particulate Filters and Diesel Oxidation Catalysts | US EPA