Purchasing commercial vehicles requires a large investment of both money and time. Without regular equipment maintenance, you may experience sub-par quality and equipment breakdowns. A Service Contract with GH Mobil ensures that general maintenance as suggested by the manufacturer and any additional maintenance required by your engineer is covered.

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At GH Mobil we approach PM programs seriously, and we know that each customer requires a different set of services. Therefore we customize our PM Programs by customer, no two are the same. Our service contracts are written to only perform maintenance on the equipment you select, and include a detailed interview and site visit before implementation.

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1. PM procedure design: Doing the effective things

To define your process, begin at the end: What results does your company want from a PM program? If it's savings you seek, this should come from achieving minimal unplanned downtime and minimal lost production opportunity time, minimal spare parts costs, minimal maintenance labor costs, minimal manufacturing interruptions, maximum manufacturing time available per machine, maximum quality of products and maximum machine life spans. These areas are where the majority of the savings will be found.  GH Mobil provides you with complimentary online fleet maintenance tool that allows you to track all expenses associated with your vehicles.

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The best PM procedures are written by people who understand OEM recommendations. These individuals also understand their vehicles' performance history and service requirements in your service environment. They look at the age of each vehicle. They examine its static and dynamic systems. They look at its foundation, support, mechanical, electrical, electronics, control, pneumatic and hydraulic systems. They analyze how power losses, power spikes, environmental impacts and operator errors can affect each vehicle.

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To catch and repair vehicle problems before their components fail, a detailed analysis must take place. If your PM program architects don't closely examine these causes of vehicle failures, they'll also miss some of the inspections that will need to be baked into your program's task list.

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2. PM procedure scheduling: Efficient use of people and resources

Once the proper procedures determined, each vehicle needs to be scheduled. In most plants or job sites, this means setting up daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual PM events. While not all vehicles require daily or weekly preventive maintenance checks, most will require monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual exams. To develop a quarterly PM schedule, many take their monthly PM and add a few things that don't need to be inspected monthly but do need to be inspected more than twice per year. This also applies to semi-annual and annual PM's, which are quarterly PM's that contain additional inspections twice per year or more. If these schedules are set up properly, your PM time will be kept to a minimum.

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3. PM Program Management Plan

Metrics drive everything these days, and PM management is no exception. If the client has a good work order (WO) system in place that captures maintenance labor hours, materials and reasons for each WO, these could be measured: 

• How many corrective WO's have been required for each piece of your equipment

• Which WO's address breakdowns

• Which WO's require spare parts

• How many man-hours are required per WO

 

Capturing WO detail will also help you track surges and decreases in equipment costs, and fine-tune the frequency of PM tasks.

Keep your PM management on track by regularly asking and answering these questions:

• What is the most effective way to report the successes of the PM program to upper management and to the individual managers of the departments we perform for?

• Do we spread the PM responsibility among all the maintenance people or just some of them?

• What are the advantages (or disadvantages) of having a dedicated PM team that only performs PM work?

• How do we know if our workers are actually performing the PM's tasks or simply pencil-whipping the WO?

• How do we know if tasks are being performed correctly?

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4. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

The best PM program ever designed will still fail if your employees don't understand how they will benefit and put their efforts into making it a success. If they haven't seen benefits from past PM programs, prepare to turn around negative perceptions.

While PM program design is crucial, communicating to workers is essential. They need to know what will be done. Who will be doing what, and when. What performance measures they need to meet. You'll need to answer 99 percent of their questions up front.

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Workers need to know that the PM program is fluid, that continuous improvement is the goal and that everyone's input is valued. Besides the all-important training, your communications must help workers understand that PM will remove work from their plates. 

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