6 keys to effective maintenance for recycling companies

Recycling companies can only fulfill their important role if the equipment they rely on is in good working order. The machines used to sort, minimize, and break down recyclable material is essential to their operation. But there are many ways to tackle the ongoing project that is machine maintenance. The strategies used to manage upkeep of equipment that ranges from conveyor belts and sorting machines to compactors and shredders can make a major impact on the viability of a recycling operation. Getting the strategy right, can keep your recycling operation running smoothly.

Why it is important to optimize your maintenance program

The cost of subpar maintenance practices is substantial and can significantly impact a recycling company’s bottom line. Relying solely on a reactive or run-to-failure maintenance strategy can lead to machine downtime and urgent repairs from external vendors. Over time, these avoidable breakdowns can shorten asset life for expensive equipment and increase the frequency of work stoppages.

With a relatively small investment in proactive maintenance strategies, recycling companies can avoid the most significant equipment-related expenses and impacts to productivity. In addition, companies subject to regulatory oversight may be required to take and demonstrate efforts to maintain operation through proactive measures.

Features of an effective recycling maintenance program

Any thoughtful maintenance strategy must incorporate a few key characteristics in order to achieve the right balance between investment in proactivity and minimizing overall maintenance costs.

1. Regular inspections and preventive maintenance: Routine equipment inspections help recycling companies identify potential equipment issues before they cause problems. Implementing a preventive maintenance schedule for these inspections as well as routine equipment servicing can help prevent downtime and extend equipment lifespan.

2. Training and development: Training programs for maintenance staff help ensure the whole team is adept at handling and troubleshooting your equipment issues. Well-trained personnel can perform tasks more efficiently and reduce the risk of errors or rework.

3. Inventory management for spare parts: An organized inventory of spare parts helps reduce repair time and avoid excessive shipping costs for last-minute parts purchases. Well-managed inventory can also minimize waste due to over-purchasing of parts that eventually become obsolete before they can be used.

4. Technology: A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) streamlines maintenance processes, making it easy to track asset history, schedule work orders, and monitor maintenance costs. A CMMS can provide visibility and accountability for the critical aspects of your maintenance strategy as well as key insights for more informed decision-making.

5. Condition monitoring and predictive maintenance: Condition-monitoring technology such as IoT sensors tracks equipment data in real-time. Marrying the asset data from IoT sensors with the maintenance history in a CMMS can identify patterns that can enhance your predictive maintenance program.

6. Documentation and record-keeping: Comprehensive records and maintenance histories provide the context needed when making important data-driven decisions such as when to repair or replace a piece of equipment. It also provides insight into productivity and cost of maintenance operations, and helps you stay audit-ready.

How a CMMS empowers recycling companies

A CMMS streamlines overall maintenance operations for recycling companies – automating preventive maintenance, capturing asset and maintenance history, and making it easy to manage parts, POs, and vendors.

Here are some of the benefits of implementing Limble at your recycling facility:

• Centralize maintenance operations. Recycling centers often rely on a wide variety of equipment. A CMMS serves as a central platform to schedule, track, and manage maintenance tasks across them all. It also serves as a hub for all maintenance team activity, streamlining communication and information sharing.
• Automate preventive maintenance. Manually managing preventive maintenance can be time consuming and prone to error. Limble makes it easy to set up PM schedules tailored to each asset with detailed instructions and parts information. Technicians are assigned PMs and follow checklists, log notes, and close out completed tasks, giving managers real-time visibility with Limble’s mobile app.
• Access asset history and maintenance reporting. Whether you’re preparing for an audit, evaluating productivity, or looking for failure patterns, Limble provides all the historical data you need. The Global Dashboard automatically tracks key metrics over time like cost of operations, MTBF, MTTR, and employee productivity. You can also build and share your own custom reports to track the KPIs important to your organization.
• Manage parts, POs and vendors with ease. Use Limble to manage spare parts and preferred vendors. Attaching parts ensures your team knows exactly what they need in order to complete the task, and QR codes make it simple to check out parts and keep inventory up-to-date. Setting parts quantity thresholds will notify you when inventory is running low so you can reorder and eliminate the risk of downtime caused by out-of-stock critical parts.

Striking the right balance for your recycling plant

Investing in the right maintenance strategies can go a long way toward advancing productivity and reducing costs at recycling companies. Just like other industries that rely on heavy equipment, an approach that combines thoughtful reactive maintenance with well-planned proactive steps to maintain critical equipment can achieve the right balance. By incorporating these best practices and ensuring your team has the right tools and technology, organizations can begin to see quick improvements that will only grow over time.

To learn more, visit limblecmms.com.