Four Maintenance Strategies to Extend Warehouse Equipment Life

Summary

In high-throughput environments, equipment maintenance can find itself at the bottom of the list of priorities. In an industry plagued by labor shortages, teams are overloaded, focusing on meeting customer demand and limiting downtime. While fulfilling orders and moving materials through the supply chain are essential to productive warehousing, keeping equipment well-maintained is just as important. Part of keeping your operations running smoothly is establishing comprehensive maintenance strategies designed to extend warehouse equipment life. This is especially true for material handling equipment and mobile equipment, which quite literally keep your vital business moving.
 
A lot goes into creating a well-oiled maintenance machine. It starts with knowing where your equipment is in its lifecycle and understanding the necessary steps to ensure its operation. It also requires recognizing when maintenance tasks should be performed, what your internal teams can handle themselves and when it may be time to call in a third-party.
 
Let's explore the most important considerations for an effective maintenance strategy and why service and maintenance must be engrained into daily operations to provide the best ROI for your equipment.
 

1. Consider preventive maintenance

What is preventive maintenance? And how can it be used to extend your equipment life? Preventive maintenance is a proactive maintenance approach, relying on regular inspections, servicing, planned downtime and repairs to catch and prevent failures. These planned tasks guarantee warehouses run smoother, smarter and safer.
 
While the benefits of using preventive maintenance strategies may seem obvious, it’s not always easy to change reactive maintenance habits. Reactive, or run-to-failure, maintenance strategies are costly and can lead to reduced equipment life and increased worker injuries. In fact, according to the State of Industrial Maintenance report by MaintainX, the average cost of one hour of unplanned downtime can be around $25,000-$50,000, depending on the size of an organization.
 
The goal of preventive maintenance is to address equipment issues before they escalate, which can significantly improve a system’s lifecycle. Regular equipment checks and inspections can help strategically inform planned downtime, helping you avoid costly issues during peak times and navigate larger replacement projects.
 

2. Use data for predictive maintenance

As the manufacturing industry evolves, more and more facilities are relying on automated solutions and data-driven insights to inform maintenance strategies. This is known as predictive maintenance. True to its name, predictive maintenance is designed to anticipate warehouse maintenance needs before they occur using data infrastructure and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.
 
Predictive maintenance can help your teams monitor performance, anticipate potential failures and optimize workflows. It can also drive lower maintenance costs by up to 25%. A robust data infrastructure is key to an effective predictive maintenance strategy. By using sensors, condition monitoring systems, real-time tracking, predictive analytics platforms and more, teams can keep a finger on the pulse of all equipment and systems within their facility. Analyzing this data helps to inform decision-making about system upgrades. It's also essential for extending equipment life as it flags potential issues early on and helps avoid premature wear, tear and failure.

3. Keep detailed records

Maintaining a proper maintenance tracking system is critical to efficient warehousing. Better equipment insights mean more informed business decisions. And without detailed records, teams can lose track of where a system is in its lifecycle and unknowingly ignore signs of critical degradation. It’s important for all internal team members to understand when a system was last serviced, if a piece of equipment has repeatedly failed and what the most recent issue was. These records can help predict future maintenance needs, ensuring you’re allocating for planned downtime and budgeting effectively.
 
Detailed records also ensure your equipment remains compliant with industry safety standards and can help reduce worker injuries. It’s important to use a consistent format for all maintenance records so tasks don’t get lost in the shuffle in high-throughput environments. Consider transitioning to digital maintenance records to keep teams organized and informed, or add simple equipment checklists to your routine to keep proactive maintenance top of mind.

4. Train on-site teams

Internal maintenance teams are the backbone of effective warehousing. Tapping into your on-site team’s expertise is crucial to limit downtime and keep equipment running at optimal performance. However, it’s unfair to expect your people to be experts in all the various equipment running within their facility.
 
Developing effective and consistent training opportunities for maintenance crews is an important part of building a well-rounded, flexible team. Consider both hands-on and digital training opportunities for workers to learn new skills and grow their expertise. Bring in third-party vendors to show your teams how to handle and service equipment effectively. These types of trainings aren’t just a quick fix, they’ll transform your maintenance strategy for the long-term, empowering teams to operate systems safely and address maintenance issues before equipment fails.  

Having a maintenance-first mindset

Efficient warehousing takes more than simply having the right solutions in place – it requires a comprehensive maintenance strategy that keeps equipment running safely and efficiently for as long as possible. While internal maintenance teams play a critical role in daily maintenance tasks, partnering with a third-party vendor who knows the ins and outs of each system can help fill skill gaps, ensure peak equipment performance and train teams to prevent potential failures. Prioritizing the life of your equipment doesn’t just keep your vital business moving; it can unlock better operational flow, improved worker safety and increased revenue.