Maintenance is maintenance, right?
Not so fast.
There are two disciplines of maintenance- “preventative” and “routine.”
Think of brushing your teeth vs. going to the dentist. Brushing (routine) takes place (ideally) every day and keeps your pearly whites happy and healthy. The dentist (preventative) takes place (ideally) annually and provides long-term insurance that your teeth won’t fall out of your head.
Routine maintenance, simply, involves small-scale things usually requiring little or no training and resulting in smooth day-to-day operation or preventing unusual wear and tear. Things like oil changes, fluids, greasing chains and pneumatic systems and tire inflation.
Conversely, preventative maintenance involves systematic inspections, identifying problems and correcting them, and getting out in front of potential failures.
Routine and preventative maintenance really work hand in hand to keep your forklift and, for that matter, other machinery in your facility running properly.
Preventative maintenance will take longer than routine maintenance and may require pulling a forklift out of the rotation for some time. Still, it’s better than the alternative.
OSHA’s required start-of-shift checklist obviously falls under “routine” since it happens at the start (and hopefully the end) of every shift, but it also can extend the life of your forklift and contribute to a safe shift. Keep your batteries fully charged (you can decide between “Opportunity” charging or “standard” charging), check your gauges to make sure they’re reading correctly, check your brakes- leave nothing to chance.
You MUST perform routine, daily maintenance to avoid breakdowns that could cause you short lapses in production, but you MUST perform preventative maintenance to avoid catastrophic failures that could not only cost you days (if not weeks) of down time and a lot of money.
As always, contact us if you have any questions about care and maintenance of your forklift, either preventative or routine. We have checklists that can help and our technicians have seen, literally, everything. We can walk you through just about anything that comes up.