Planned Preventive Maintenance
Computers and IT equipment are fast becoming most business’ lifeblood, so it’s important to keep them up and running. Waiting until a piece of equipment shows signs of trouble can seriously impact production, and in turn, your bottom line or even damage your reputation with your customers.
To combat this, a maintenance approach called Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) should be implemented. Instead of waiting for the machine to malfunction or stop working completely, maintenance and inspections are scheduled at regular intervals. Footprints are normally left well in advance of a system hardware or software failure, this enables us to discover potential issues before they even arise.
How Planned Preventive Maintenance Works
NAP Computer Solutions Limited will complete an IT MOT initially which is like a mini audit of your equipment. This allows us to check that all your equipment is running effectively. It will also allow us to recommend a maintenance schedule that fits in with your requirements. This could be weekly, fortnightly or monthly depending on the size of your business.
It is a similar concept to a car maintenance plan. For example, a car manufacturer may suggest a car’s oil should be changed every 3,000 miles or every 3 months, whichever comes first, the transmission should be checked annually, and a general tune-up should be done once a year as well.
This same concept is applied to the IT equipment in your organisation and during these PPM visits your IT Equipment will be checked thoroughly in an attempt to catch any hardware or software malfunctions before they even occur. During the course of the year this should help you keep track of your IT expenditure as well as reduce costs. As an example; replacing a computer hard disk before it completely dies and scheduling this in after a PPM visit not only saves cost but also saves valuable downtime which would occur if the hard disk was left to completely malfunction.
Why This Approach Works
Instead of taking a reactive approach to equipment maintenance, i.e. waiting for something to break before you react to it, PPM allows you to take a proactive approach. If you check your equipment on a regular basis, you are more likely to catch small things and repair them before they become larger issues later. PPM lowers the chances of losing productivity due to a malfunctioning or broken piece of equipment. The longer you can keep your equipment functioning on a continuous basis, the more productive your business can be.
Other benefits to this approach include:
- Setting up orders for replacement parts well in advance of when you will need them.
- You can schedule any downtime more effectively and lessen the impact on service / production time
- Spot potentially serious computer issues before they actually occur
- Reduce yearly IT Expenditure
- Reduce downtime to your business