How to Create a Practical Maintenance Schedule for Your Construction Equipment

Construction equipment failure is an inevitable occurrence. It often comes with money-wasting downtimes, increased safety risks, and costly emergency repairs. Unfortunately, the operations manager, maintenance supervisor, or plant manager is held responsible for these outcomes, and this could lead to reprimands at best or job termination in the worst-case scenario.

The best way to reduce the frequency of equipment failure is by creating a practical construction equipment maintenance schedule. This is a timetable that outlines the regular inspections, servicing and repairs you need to keep your construction equipment performing at its best.

In this article, we’ll show you a step-by-step process of creating an effective construction maintenance schedule. We’ll also point out factors that you should take note of before creating this schedule, and we’ll recommend software that will make each scheduling process seamless and accurate. 

Factors to Consider Before Creating a Construction Maintenance Schedule

Before creating a heavy construction equipment maintenance schedule, here are some of the factors that you should consider to ensure that it is accurate and suits your current maintenance needs.

1. Type of Construction Equipment Maintenance

There are three main types of construction equipment maintenance: preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance and reactive maintenance. These three maintenance types require different approaches and tasks that are carried out on different parts of construction equipment. 

They include:

• Preventive maintenance: Technicians look for maintenance or repair issues that will occur in the future. This type of maintenance aims to prevent construction equipment failures from occurring in the first place.

• Predictive maintenance: Here, technicians collect real-time data on the health of construction equipment. They will then use this data to identify, detect and address breakdown issues as they occur. It usually works with condition-based monitoring to optimize the performance of construction equipment and increase its lifespan.

• Reactive or corrective maintenance: This type of maintenance is carried out after the asset has broken down. This is the oldest type of maintenance and is done based on the belief that the cost sustained during an equipment’s downtime is lower than the cost of sustaining an entire maintenance program.

It is important to know the type of maintenance you want to carry out before creating a construction equipment maintenance schedule because it allows you to tailor the schedule to your company’s specific needs. This also ensures that you address all necessary maintenance tasks systematically.

One way you can determine the type of maintenance for your construction equipment is by consulting the manufacturer’s recommendations. Another way is to analyze how frequently and intensively the construction equipment is used. This will give you an idea of the type of maintenance to carry out on each of them.

How LLumin Can Help

LLumin is a construction equipment maintenance software designed to make construction equipment maintenance easy. It provides a real-time and condition-based monitoring feature that can help you determine the type of maintenance that your construction equipment needs. It also provides maintenance analytics, which suggests insights that direct you on how you can optimize your maintenance schedule and reduce costs incurred from construction equipment failure.

Further reading: The power of preventive maintenance for heavy equipment.  

LLumin provides a construction equipment predictive maintenance guide and algorithm that predicts equipment failure before it occurs. This algorithm model relies on the equipments’ maintenance historical data and its current condition to accurately predict when it is due for a technician’s visit.

2. The Equipment That Will Be Covered in the Maintenance Schedule

If you have a lot of construction equipment, then there’s a chance that if care is not taken, you might miss one or two small, easily forgotten, but important construction equipment when creating a maintenance schedule. 

To ensure you don’t forget any construction equipment, conduct a thorough inventory of all equipment on-site. You can do this manually by creating a construction equipment maintenance checklist to systematically document each piece of equipment and its maintenance requirements.

How LLumin Can Help You Create an Inventory of Your Construction Equipment

This construction equipment maintenance software has a 3D feature that shows a three dimensional view of your construction facility. This feature allows you to pan, rotate and zoom in and out of the view, giving you a picture of all the construction equipment that you have.

LLumin also comes with a real-time condition monitoring sub-feature that provides you with the status and tag information of each of the construction equipment displayed in the 3D rendering view. All you need to do is click on the equipment, and you’ll view information like its maintenance history, downtime history, lockout/tag safety information, manufacturer’s information, manuals, pictures, spare part information, etc.

3. Who Will Manage the Construction Equipment Maintenance Schedule?

Creating a heavy construction equipment maintenance schedule is the easy part, but religiously sticking to that schedule is the difficult part. This factor is often ignored, but its consequence is having a schedule that no one follows or even remembers. This, in turn, leaves the problem of unplanned downtime, increased safety risks, and other issues that come with unresolved equipment failure.

To make sure that your equipment maintenance schedule is strictly followed, you need to appoint personnel to oversee this schedule. This could be you or any other team member who has the managerial skills needed to hold down the forte. 

By appointing dedicated personnel to manage the maintenance schedule, you’re making sure that the repair team does their work when due and that all your construction equipment is regularly inspected and serviced.

4. Identify What Causes the Failure of Each Piece of Equipment

Knowing what makes your equipment tick reduces the time your team spends on identifying 

and solving failure problems. This is an important factor to consider before creating a construction equipment maintenance schedule. It helps you accurately plan maintenance tasks and ensures that technicians don’t miss critical components when carrying out repairs and servicing.

To identify the common causes of failure in each construction equipment, you need to review your past maintenance records, and failure reports to find a pattern of recurring issues. If you don’t have this data, a good place to start is by conducting regular inspection checks to identify wear and tear and other potential problems. 

This will give you an idea of the components to monitor and the typical breakdown issues it has. You can also get insights from the manufacturer’s maintenance recommendations. You can also check the equipment manuals, which usually contain information on the common breakdown issues that can happen to a construction equipment and the best maintenance practices to follow.

How to Set up a Construction Equipment Maintenance Schedule?

Now that you’ve understood all the factors and elements that will help you create an accurate and reliable construction equipment maintenance schedule, here are five steps to follow to create the schedule:

Step 1: Create an Equipment Maintenance List

If you haven’t created a construction equipment maintenance checklist during the preparation process, then now is the time to do so. It is the first step to take when creating a construction maintenance schedule. 

As we mentioned previously, this involves making a list of all the construction equipment in your facility – you can use the LLumin 3D feature for this.

Next, you have to separate the equipment whose maintenance needs will be addressed in the schedule and narrow down their common breakdown issues and corresponding maintenance tasks. Use inventory records, owner’s manuals, service logs and other records to collect the data needed in this first step, or you can do this automatically using LLumin’s 3D feature. This step gives you a clear overview of all your construction equipment and makes it easier to include their maintenance tasks and intervals in the schedule.

Step 2: Allocate Maintenance Intervals

Without accurate and well-planned maintenance intervals, you stand the risk of creating a schedule that contains irregular servicing times. This unpredictability could make it difficult for technicians to align their work schedule with your maintenance schedule. 

If your technicians are in-house, then this might increase negligence and might make it challenging to optimize their time. It’s worse if your technicians are subcontractors and freelancers because this increases the chances of missed maintenance, as they may have scheduled other appointments when you need them. 

To prevent this from happening, consult the equipment’s manual to accurately allocate maintenance intervals in your schedule. This tells you the manufacturer’s recommended maintenance instructions, schedules and spare part usage. 

You can also use your company’s historical data to accurately determine the best maintenance intervals for each of the construction equipment. One more way to determine maintenance intervals is by consulting technicians and operators of each equipment.

Note that the former group might have an idea of the general type of breakdown issues that your construction equipment might have but they might not know the unique issues that your construction equipment might be having or the best maintenance inter to allocate to it. 

In contrast, the latter group might know the peculiar issues and best maintenance interval for your equipment but not the best maintenance tasks for it. So it’s best to consult the two groups.

Step 3: Prioritize Equipment by Maintenance Needs or Operational Criticality

From the heavy construction equipment maintenance checklist above, highlight the construction equipment that needs urgent maintenance. Also, highlight the ones that have more importance to your company’s overall operation, then prioritize their maintenance. Doing this ensures that all maintenance is carried out as at when due especially if the capacity of your maintenance team is lower than the work to be done.

By noting the criticality and operational priority of each construction equipment on your checklist, you’re providing your team with the information they need to make smart decisions about which tasks to attend to at any given time. This will ensure that critical issues are addressed first, thereby preventing major breakdowns and costly repairs.

Step 4: Allocate Resources

The resources used in construction maintenance include skilled labor, tools, wages, materials like spare parts, etc. This fourth step ensures that maintenance tasks are completed efficiently with minimal downtime. It helps you efficiently plan for potential issues that may occur during repairs and maintenance sessions. 

It also ensures that all necessary tools and materials are available when maintenance is due to avoid delays. Allocating resources while creating a schedule offers preparedness that helps to minimize the time an equipment’s downtime and allows for swift and efficient maintenance processes.

To accurately allocate resources for your construction equipment, you need to check your company’s historical maintenance data and manufacturer’s manual to learn the resources you need to keep the maintenance schedule running as planned. You can also consult your inventory or the technical team to give you an idea of the number of resources that would be enough to carry out maintenance for a specific period, say six to 48 months, etc.

Step 5: Assign Maintenance Tasks

Now that you’ve prepared the ingredients for your construction maintenance schedule, the next step is to assign tasks. If your company will outsource the maintenance task to external technicians, then you can skip the section, compile the results of steps one to five into a spreadsheet and send it to them; this will help them align their work schedule with your maintenance schedule. 

But if in-house technicians will carry out the maintenance tasks, then you need to assign these tasks to experienced and competent team members. Assigning maintenance tasks ensures accountability and clearly defines every team member’s maintenance responsibilities. This allows them to plan well ahead to ensure that the work gets done. It also streamlines workflow and reduces overlaps or gaps in maintenance coverage.

To accurately assign maintenance tasks, consider each team member’s skill and experience level. You also have to consider the location of the construction equipment and the travel required. This is because married team members may be less inclined to travel for work, unlike unmarried team members.

Your job doesn’t stop at task assignment; you have to ensure that the team members clearly understand their tasks and establish a communication pathway to ensure that all questions and inquiries are addressed.

Moreover, you also need to monitor task progression regularly; that way, you can track the completion status of each maintenance task, ensure that everything is going as planned and identify and fix delays early on. Always provide constructive feedback on the performance of each team member, recognize achievements and address areas of improvement to optimize the maintenance operations.

Monitor and Maintain the Health of Your Construction Equipment With Llumin

LLumin is a CMMS+ that helps users manage their assets, operations and maintenance. It gives you the real-time status of every machine in your plant. In other words, our construction equipment maintenance software helps you easily track and monitor any attributes or parameters that are essential to the operation of your construction equipment.

The LLumin software is built with decades worth of experience in manufacturing and asset management and its primary goal is to extend your construction equipment’s lifecycle and ensure higher return on asset investment. It provides accurate historical and real-time data and predicts breakdown issues to help smoothen your heavy construction equipment maintenance scheduling process and maintenance process itself.

LLumin is used by asset and operational managers across different industries like the education sector, the food industry, and the construction industry, among others. It helps to improve how operation managers oversee construction equipment, employees and inter-departmental communication.

We also offer a work order management feature that helps you efficiently create, track and manage heavy construction equipment maintenance and repair tasks. It allows you to view the details and progress of all your work orders in real-time. This makes it easy to schedule construction equipment, stay ahead of machine failures and avoid downtimes.

It has both a web-based and mobile-friendly view and allows you to conveniently monitor your maintenance operations from any device. It offers advanced reporting capabilities and user-friendly dashboards. This enables you to oversee cross-departmental maintenance teams and improves their access to the information they need to improve operations 24/7.

It gives you paperless control over your inventory and helps you collect detailed transaction logs and audit trails that you can use during OSHA, EPA, and FDA compliance checks. It allows you to quickly gather data like your work history, incident reports, and notification logs to help you streamline your audit process, even during impromptu compliance checks. 

Interested? Schedule your free software demo to automate the process of creating an accurate construction equipment maintenance schedule

Pricing Plan

LLumin has three pricing plans.

1. Professional plan: this costs $49/month per user. It offers features like asset management, maintenance work management, notification alerts, stockroom management, purchase order management, facility view, etc.

2. Premium plan: this costs $80/ month per user. It contains all the features in the professional plan plus condition-based monitoring, fleet and vehicle systems interface, HR management, business system integration, advanced notification workflow, etc.

3. Entreprise plan: this costs $110/month per user. It includes all the features in the basic plan plus access to risk management tools, OEE utilities, SAP/oracle ERP integration project tracking, etc.

Conclusion

Without a proper construction equipment maintenance schedule, you subject your company to increased equipment downtime, unexpected failures, higher repair costs, and reduced operational efficiency. Thankfully, we’ve created a detailed guide on how you can manually create a construction equipment maintenance schedule.

However we advise that you employ the use of a CMMS+ software like LLumin to automate this task. It will provide accurate historical equipment maintenance data you need, accurately predict breakdowns and help you create an accurate maintenance schedule. 

Schedule your free software demo today! 

Frequently Asked Questions