4 Ways to improve productivity for maintenance teams

In most cases, poor productivity is the result of subpar planning practices. By improving your maintenance planning, you’ll enable your technicians to be more productive.

Note that the typical range for wrench time is between 25% and 30%. With the following practices, you could increase it to over 50%, which would drastically increase productivity.

 Schedule Tasks By Proximity 

One way to imporve maintenece planning is to assign tasks based on proximity. If you can group work order assignments so technicians don;t have to travel to far from one job to the next, you'll see an increase in wrench time.

To do this, you’ll probably have to train your supervisors to keep locations in mind when making work order assignments. However, maintenance planners can help with this as well. By making plans well in advance of when they’re needed, you’ll be able to make more efficient scheduling decisions based on location and priority.

Arrange for parts to be available when needed

This type of planning also allows you to make sure your team gets the tools and parts they need in advance. If your team is able to get their hands on everything they need before they head out into the field, you’ll shave precious minutes—if not hours—off the amount of time it takes to complete each job.

Provide remote access to data

Maintenance teams frequently have to spend time looking at schematics and instructions. If those aren’t easily accessible from the jobsite, that can take quite a bit of time. One way to remedy this is to provide them with remote access to that information.

Some CMMS solutions allow you to upload schematics, warranty information, and other documents to each asset’s profile. With a connected mobile app, your technicians will be able to access that information on site, saving the time it takes to travel to and from your physical records repository.

Implement predictive maintenance

One last way that most people don’t consider in terms of wrench time is predictive maintenance. As you implement PdM in your maintenance processes, your technicians won’t have to spend as much time on diagnostics, giving them more time to put toward completing work orders.

In addition, predictive maintenance gives you more advanced warning on potential issues, allowing you plenty of room to schedule everything ahead of time.