Equipment Management: 5 Tips To Increase Efficiency

Managing equipment across multiple locations, plants, or buildings can be challenging, but there are ways to simplify the process. 

Effective equipment management can make a big difference in the use of equipment—whether it’s heavy equipment, tools, or trucks, or cars. In this blog post, we describe five tips for increasing efficiency in equipment management.

What Is Equipment Management?

Equipment management includes the managing, monitoring, and maintenance of both motorized assets and non-motorized equipment. Effective equipment management can make a massive difference to an organization’s equipment utilization. It allows an organization to know where its assets are and whether or not they’re being used to their full potential. 

The Need for Efficient Equipment Management

Keeping track of equipment across multiple locations, plants, or buildings can be a challenge, but there are ways to simplify the process. A QHSE system with equipment management capabilities will give your organization a significant advantage. With a QHSE management platform, you can manage all types of equipment across multiple locations, save costs, save time, and by analyzing, choose which device works best for the business.  

5 Tips To Increase Efficiency in Equipment Management 

From experience, we have found several points that can take an organization’s equipment management to the next level.  

1. Create an Equipment Inventory List

One of the tasks in productive equipment management is to develop an accurate and real-time inventory of your assets. Your staff should count all your equipment, label it, and import the information into one central database, preferably cloud-based. A great way to keep track of your inventory is by labeling your equipment with a QR code. With Qooling, it’s also possible to use this feature to organize your equipment management.

2. Analyze Your Equipment

It is critical to understand how your equipment contributes to the success of your business. If the quality of your equipment is good, your workers are safe. And what could be more important than the health of your workers? Also, it is cost-saving when you buy high-quality equipment compared to poor quality. After all, you need to do less maintenance and are less likely to purchase new equipment in the near future. 

Answering the following questions will help you manage your equipment properly. This will allow you to analyze your equipment and collect important data.

• How often do you do an inspection?
• Who’s responsible for the inspection?
• How often do you do equipment maintenance?
• Who should do the maintenance?

Analyzing equipment increases efficiency because you can tell which piece of equipment needs less maintenance over time and has a longer working life. 

3. Leverage Data for Predictive Maintenance

Maintenance can cost a lot of money, but so does downtime. While you cannot entirely avoid breakdowns and still need to service your equipment, you can apply data analytics to predict machine breakdowns and associated costs. 

Information on the purchase date, warranty expiration date, and usage data can help you prioritize repairing your most used equipment. Rarely used but critical equipment should also be serviced at regular intervals. 

As you gather the data regarding equipment, you need to start preventing equipment issues from continuing to occur. You can do this by training workers. This allows you to take preventive action and avoid future equipment issues. 

4. Identify and Resolve Issues Quickly

What happens when one piece of equipment breaks down repeatedly? For example, you have a crucial piece of equipment that breaks down often. Breakdowns of essential equipment will likely become a severe operational and financial drain on your business if left unresolved. 

Instead, you can identify these problems using the power of the cloud and data analytics. When engineers finish repairing the equipment, you could instruct them to file the report in the software database. 

With the data reports and analytics, you should be able to figure out the underlying reason for the failure. It will save the organization a lot of money in the long run.  

5. Focus on Equipment Quality

While it is critical to investigate all equipment problems, some things will inevitably break or stop working. 

When purchasing (new) equipment, you need to consider:

• What have other buyers said about the equipment? Take a look at the reviews.
• Are the tools reliable for professional use?

If you have and use a management system, you could track which equipment is good quality and which is not. By measuring this, you can ultimately save costs. For example, you buy two machines. The first machine breaks down after one year and the second after two years. By analyzing this, you can base future purchases on previously analyzed data and thus save costs in the long run. 

Equipment Management with a QHSE management platform

By using a QHSE management platform, you can optimize the equipment management process. Quality and safety management are greatly improved when organized equipment management is efficient within a company. A QHSE management platform with equipment management capabilities gives your organization a big advantage. 

Interested in the possibilities of a Quality & Safety Management platform? Let’s schedule a guided demo with one of our experts!