Construction equipment maintenance contributes to about 40% of total construction project overrun costs, according to a study in the International Journal of Engineering Science Invention. In addition, failing to keep up with your preventative maintenance has a significant ripple effect on greater projects. This can stall your progression, cause you to miss key due dates, which, in turn, leads to lower profits for your construction business. Spending a little more time planning out preventative maintenance of mechanical equipment can pay dividends for your overall operation. Here are some concrete examples of how this plays out.
The Key Reasons For Mechanical Equipment Maintenance
1. Saves You Money Long-Term
Sure, getting regular equipment maintenance represents an investment. This can seem doubly frustrating if you have your equipment looked at only to find out that it’s perfectly functional. However, you need to take a long-term point of view here. When you invest in the maintenance of mechanical equipment, it’s not about managing a major issue each time. Instead, you’re paying professionals to catch the smaller issues, do standard procedures, and replace certain parts before larger ones arise. This not only means you don’t have to pay for these massive repair jobs, but you don’t need to pay premiums for emergency services. If you compare a span of years of preventative maintenance vs. reactive repair, the maintenance method will save you money in the long run.
2. Safety
Statistically speaking, millions of dollars are awarded in lawsuits every year regarding personnel injured on construction sites. While you can’t necessarily foresee every circumstance, you should be working towards minimizing risks of accidents, and maintenance is a major part of that. As mentioned before, the more regularly your equipment is inspected and tuned, the less likely it is to fail or not work properly. Combined with best practices, this means a lower risk overall of injury. A safe job site is a more profitable one, not just due to legal costs and compensation, but also due to the lower amount of set-back days.
3. Saves You Time
Whether you get construction equipment maintenance done or not, repairs and upkeep are going to leave your pieces of equipment out of the rotation. However, would you rather have it out of operation for a few hours at a time of your choosing, or potentially for days or even weeks at a time? By doing regular maintenance of your mechanical equipment, you can cycle out your equipment for service, so operations are always up and running at some level on your job site. To be fair, creating this schedule can be daunting if you have a lot of equipment. This is why we recommend looking into construction management software to create a comprehensive schedule so that preventative maintenance doesn’t hold up a project. By keeping up with regular maintenance, you won’t have out-of-service equipment for days or more, just a short period of the designated time.
4. Efficiency
Operational efficiency is something that everyone should be focusing on at their construction site. This increases the return on investment for every action your company takes, and by proxy, it means more profit. Luckily, keeping up with construction equipment maintenance fits neatly into this mindset. Because preventative maintenance of mechanical equipment checks for wear and damage, it helps keep all the parts working efficiently. Preventative maintenance also checks alignments and other issues for users to get the most out of their machines. This leads to greater efficiency on the job site because not only is equipment functional, but it’s running at its optimum performance. You’ll also see better safety because there’s a lower risk of failure, but also a lower temptation for your team to try and adjust things on their own to have it work better. In addition, you don’t have to worry about missing deadlines because a piece of equipment is working slower or less effectively than you assumed.
5. Records, Accreditation, and Insurance
Regularly maintained equipment is often a condition for certain trade organizations and other accreditations your business can get. In order to keep accreditations current, it’s important to keep all construction equipment maintenance up-to-date. This matters for insurance also. The payout for some policies is contingent on your company keeping all relevant equipment maintenance up to date. The last thing you want to do is have a case of equipment damage or failure, expect a payout to cover your needs, then find out you don’t qualify.
6. Warranty Cover
Similar to insurance, warranties can cover replacement parts and other equipment issues. Also, just like insurance, these benefits are under the condition that equipment was regularly serviced. If this isn’t done and properly documented, you have no proof to actually reap the benefits of your warranty. This means you may need to wait longer to get the service or be on the hook for paying yourself. While it’s important to read the fine print on any warranty, you want to stack the deck in your favor by having a paper trail showing your company did its part to take care of the piece of equipment.
7. Emergencies and Breakdowns
One of the major reasons that you want to keep up proper construction equipment maintenance is minimizing the risk of emergencies and breakdowns. The idea of waiting until something seems off isn’t really feasible in a construction setting. For one thing, many pieces of equipment may not give off signs of trouble until the point of failure. In addition, that failure can lead to an inconvenient halt of operations, or potentially an accident/other damage. These moments create larger costs in both time and money. Be proactive and avoid the worst-case scenario.
Construction equipment maintenance is a drain on project budgets, time, and a boon to safety, which is why it’s important to adhere to equipment preventative maintenance schedules, regardless of whether the equipment seems to be running fine today. However, to be fair, this is sometimes easier said than done. When you have multiple operations across multiple job sites, keeping track of the status of every single piece of equipment is a daunting task. This is why you need software like eSUB, which helps you create preventative maintenance schedules for mechanical equipment on a large scale.
Construction equipment maintenance contributes to about 40% of total construction project overrun costs. It also contributes to several other issues, yet, is easily fixable. Here 7 reasons to maintain your equipment.
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Thanks to modern technology, the construction industry has come a long way. The fact that we can now build modern edifices and massive structures can be attributed to the availability of advanced construction equipment that makes work faster and more efficient. Every construction company needs to invest in construction equipment because it is an important part of any development project.
Using machinery to do work makes it faster, ensuring the timely completion of a project. It also improves the quality of work done and makes work easier for construction workers. While it might not be possible to buy every kind of construction equipment possible, you may opt for construction equipment hire from reliable equipment rental companies like Easy Tool Hire. The following are some of the reasons why buying or hiring construction equipment is important for every project.
Construction projects are completed faster and more efficiently when you have the right equipment on-site compared to when you do all the work manually. Having the right skills and sufficient manpower is only one-half of what you need to carry out construction projects effectively. Even as simple as a power tool hire can make a world of difference in the progress of your project. Hence, construction companies need to invest in cutting-edge technologies to ensure that their projects are completed within the given deadline.
As a construction company, the value of your brand is often tied to how mechanized your operations are. Potential clients will judge your ability to deliver quality work within the required deadline based on the tools and equipment you use for your work. Thus, the value of your construction brand and your chances of getting new clientele depends on how much you leverage technology.
Using the right tools and equipment to carry out a project allows contractors to deliver optimally and complete their projects with as few defects as possible. This is why it is important to invest in plant and tool hire for your project. For instance, compacting and grading the soil before a project begins is necessary to ensure the strength and reliability of a building foundation. If you skip this stage of the project or don’t carry it out because you don’t have the right soil compaction equipment, you will end up with a structure with a weak foundation. For quality standard purposes, it is necessary to use machinery and equipment that ensure the quality of your work.
Many people try to circumvent using proper tools and equipment because of how much it costs to hire heavy construction equipment. However, in the long run, the cost savings that come from using the right equipment for a project makes up for the high cost. Using the right equipment increases productivity, allowing you to complete a project in a timely and efficient manner. In addition to this, you’ll also end up with fewer defect-related claims or delay penalties when your project is properly executed. Fortunately, modern construction equipment is built to last. They’re designed in a way that ensures that they work for a long time without breaking down. This provides long-term value that helps to save costs even more in the long run. Additionally, you may also choose to rent this equipment instead, especially if the upfront cost seems too high for you.
One of the best things about using advanced machinery for construction projects is that it allows you to complete tasks that would have been otherwise impossible to execute. Many modern construction equipments serve multiple purposes and can help you complete similar tasks smoothly. This saves you money on multiple fronts while ensuring your project runs as smoothly as possible.
For some projects, using advanced construction equipment is not a mere necessity, it is compulsory. While it may be possible to improvise or use simple tools for simple construction projects, high-rise buildings, massive suspended bridges, and roads cut through difficult terrains cannot be completed without construction equipment plant hire. Only construction companies that own or can rent the heavy-duty equipment required to complete projects like this can be hired for such projects.
Productivity and timely delivery of projects are necessary qualities that every construction company needs to prioritize. The adoption of new technology and the right equipment increases the ability of a construction company to meet these goals and stay desirable to potential clients.
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