A Preventative Maintenance Checklist to Protect Your Business Assets

It’s easy to take them for granted, but your business assets play a more important role in the success of your business than you may realize. The term “assets” applies to everything from your office equipment, furniture, and facilities to your company vehicles, your employees, and even your business knowledge. Every organization watches its bottom line. Protecting your business assets is one of the most effective ways to do just that.

What is Preventative Maintenance?

Preventative maintenance refers to scheduled maintenance on your business assets, which in turn prevents the premature breakdown and costly replacement of equipment. In other words, you’re ensuring that your assets have routine servicing and inspection, so you maximize their lifespan and avoid the disruption in your productivity that occurs when vital equipment breaks down.

"Preventative maintenance refers to scheduled maintenance on your business assets."

Which Business Assets Need Protection?

Among the most common business assets requiring routine maintenance are

• IT equipment (including desktop computers, laptops, copiers, printers, servers, and drives)
• Factory equipment, machines, and tools
• Vehicles
• Data
• Safety gear

Why Protect Your Business Assets?

It’s critical to protect your business assets because they face many risks – as do you if you ignore them. Here are just a few scenarios that could cost your organization time, money or both:

• Assets that aren’t maintained regularly could break down and require major and costly repairs.
• Productivity may slow down or halt while you wait for the asset to become operational again.
• You have to purchase a replacement asset long before you’d intended to.
• The machines in your warehouse could be destroyed in the event of a natural disaster.
• Your IT equipment could be stolen, along with the sensitive data it contains.

Many organizations don’t maintain their assets, but rather repair them when they’re broken. Unfortunately, this perspective is shortsighted and considerably more expensive. This approach has been dubbed “breakdown maintenance”, and it often allows what would have been a minor repair mushroom into a major overhaul – or worse. Companies who are especially strapped for cash may then opt for the least expensive fixes possible – a band-aid solution if you will.

The Preventative Maintenance Checklist Template

Every organization should create and follow a preventative maintenance checklist. If you’ve never used one before, consider the following steps when you create yours:

• Track Service History
• Monitor Overall Condition and Life Expectancy
• Keep an Inventory on all Parts and Pieces
• Backup All Data in Cloud-based Software
• Check for Updates
• Regularly Update History, Inventory, and Tracking

Which Industries Need Preventative Maintenance?

Most industries should consider preventative maintenance, but there are a few industries for which these practices are especially critical:

• Work Vehicles and Transportation Fleets
• IT and Electronics
• Education
• Manufacturing
• Accounting

Best Practices

It’s never too early to begin managing the risks to your assets by first documenting your assets and then determining the potential vulnerabilities associated with each. You can reduce asset risks by taking steps including:

• Document all of your business assets
• Determine the potential risks and vulnerabilities of each asset
• Carry out regular asset checks, including stock and inventory checks
• Restrict access to assets (for example, data) where appropriate
• Comply with data protection legislation
• Apply protective security measures, where necessary
• Conduct regular reviews of your asset and management practices

Your business assets represent an enormous investment, so it stands to reason that you want to maximize the lifespan of every one of those items. Each of your assets has not only a maintenance schedule to track, but also such details as a warranty, depreciation, lease/purchase information, check-in/check-out status, location, and more. Attempting to track and manage all of those moving pieces of data is simply too difficult when you have a business to run. Your best bet, then, is preventative maintenance software that can take this job off your hands and give you peace of mind while it saves you time and money.

Consider Asset Panda’s simple, yet powerful solution for your preventative maintenance needs. It can help you reduce loss, eliminate guesswork, streamline audits, and ensure more accurate reporting. This flexible platform is easy to use, offers customized reporting and on-demand access to your data.

Learn more about our asset management software by booking your free demo today!