Your manufacturing facility is running smoothly. Customers are happy and you are delivering a quality part on-time, every time. Then it happens. You can literally hear it happen on the shop floor and everything comes to a crashing halt. The months and years of good equity you built up with your customers goes away because you missed the delivery date on the biggest order of the year (or for many customers, any order). What happened? Your machine had to be shut down.

Why did this happen? You didn’t maintain your machinery properly because business was humming along, and you didn’t want to slow down production. You close your eyes and remember yourself saying over and over again, “we will do it next month” which eventually led to you forgetting. You turn to your big whiteboard that tracks your issues list and, in big capital letters, begin to add the following:

• Effectively schedule machine maintenance
• Effectively schedule equipment, tooling, or quality inspection calibration
• Know true machine maintenance costs

You think to yourself, “if there was only a ERP software system that let me schedule machine maintenance like a job or an employee.” You find yourself on Google and come across www.globalshopsolutions.com which has a Preventative Maintenance module that is fully integrated into its robust ERP software package. Like pixie dust, this module and ERP system can easily schedule your machine maintenance, schedule equipment, tooling or quality inspection calibration, and give you your true machine maintenance costs. And even better, it’s not an add on, it is fully integrated into the ERP software system. After more due diligence you realize that all ERP software packages are not the same as many require a high priced third-party add-on for preventative maintenance.

Most manufacturers need to perform regular maintenance on equipment and send quality equipment out for calibration. Some of this is especially demanding in aerospace manufacturing and an essential step for them to become AS9100. It is hard to quantify profit gained by maintaining your equipment and machines properly, but it is not hard to quantify the costs if you fail to maintain it and it is significant. First, you have to pay to fix a failed piece of equipment; second you lose precious production time due to a down machine and we all know time is an finite resource (you never get it back); and third, you will lose business. Three losses outweigh any potential gain of skipping or skimping on your preventative maintenance.

Be smart and maintain your machines like you would your home, car, or self.