It is easy to fall behind when the timely manufacturing of your product depends on every minute. Despite the best scheduling – complete with planned down time and properly conducted maintenance – things can and often do go wrong. However, there is a clear difference between missing one day of production every year or so and missing several days.
When a factory or plant goes down, the company loses more than just time. Resources are lost, and for those producing sensitive products, the ability to meet consumer demand decreases. In some cases, factories are dependent upon one another, and when one falls short, the result is a domino effect of missed production and sales. There is a struggle to regain what was lost, and more than a few days go by before things are back on track.
Every company has a bad day here and there, but at a certain point, it becomes a serious problem. So how do you know when you need outside help? There are three common indicators that will help you decide if you need the assistance of a mechanical contractor to help operations get back on track.
1) Multiple unscheduled downtimes. Although unscheduled down time is inevitable, it should still be a rare occurrence. Time is crucial in an industry such as this, and any unscheduled event has the potential for disaster. Even factories that run to failure cannot produce if they are frequently experiencing fails.
2) You’re not meeting sales and production goals because of maintenance issues. It becomes increasingly difficult to take steps forward when you are consistently dealing with uprising issues.
3) Work orders are stacked to such an extent that the maintenance department can’t attend to all of them. Consistently having at least one order on the desk is entirely different from a pile of work orders that never seems to diminish. If you are seeing nothing more than a change in thickness in the work order pile, it’s time to call in the experts.
There are many dangers associated with unscheduled down time, and one of the more crucial considerations is the relationship with a client. If there is an occasional lack of production or a miss in sales, a loyal client is not going to be disturbed. However, a client is going to think twice if it becomes a regular habit. Unscheduled down time is not worth the loss. A mechanical contractor can not only help you put things back together, but they have the skills to ensure that it will run smoothly in the future.