74 tips for reducing equipment costs (11-20)

In my first post covering equipment cost-cutting tips 1-10, I addressed several equipment cost cutting basics, including the impact of faithfully using a computerized maintenance management system. Here are cost-cutting strategies 11-20:

I have seen unnecessary use of two-man jobs many times while analyzing maintenance operations.  If they aren’t really needed for safety—do you really need to send two?  If you need a second person, could it be a lower compensated helper?

Run a Pareto chart of your highest costs.  This is a chart that shows costs in a descending order from highest to lowest with the emphasis on identifying the vital few from the trivial many. Use it to focus on your highest costs.  For example, this chart shows a great opportunity to reduce the costs on a backhoe’s preventive maintenance service intervals, since the PMs add up to 53.3 percent of the total costs. Strategies to attack these costs could include outsourcing, reducing non-valued PMs or/and extending frequencies. Use this Excel template to assist with this.

Charter a team to tackle one of the higher costs identified by the Pareto chart. Using this diagram, pin-point the potential causes to the high costs and identify the most probable ones.  Apply another Cause and Effect analysis to the most probable ones and gather facts and data on each of those.  Learn more about Cause and Effect Charts by watching the video below.