Contents
What Are Maintenance Costs?
- Maintenance costs in a company can vary depending on the type of operation, company size, industry department, and the equipment and infrastructure involved. However, the main components of these maintenance costs generally include:
- Labor costs: These include salaries of engineers, maintenance technicians, and maintenance personnel, as well as overtime and training costs, which should be frequent to keep the team up to date with the latest maintenance procedures.
- Parts and materials costs: These are costs related to spare parts and consumable materials, such as tools, supplies, lubricants, etc..
- Equipment costs: These are costs associated with the acquisition of new maintenance equipment, rental of specialized equipment, equipment depreciation, and lost profits (losses resulting from the interruption of an activity);
- Inventory costs: These are costs related to the inventory of materials, tooling, and spare parts for maintenance.
- Safety costs: These are costs associated with required inspections and certifications, and the implementation of safety measures such as PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) to protect maintenance personnel.
- Outsourced services costs: These are costs related to external services, such as specialized maintenance service providers, consulting practices, and technical audits.
- Management costs: These are administrative costs related to the planning and management of maintenance activities, such as management software and systems. They are essential for optimizing overall costs and delivering excellent ROI.
Why Is the Maintenance Cost Report Important?
Overseeing the maintenance department is a complex task. It requires keeping pace with production, monitoring KPIs, and being prepared to make decisions under pressure. In these situations, the maintenance cost report is a tool that simplifies your work.
This report shows the operation’s financial health without losing sight of assets, processes, or other expenses. Also, this document allows you to set realistic goals that align with your team’s capacity.
In other words, it is a glimpse of the financial past of maintenance activities and a glimpse of what is to come.
How to Prepare a Maintenance Cost Report?
Each maintenance management operation has different characteristics, meaning supervisors have distinct aims. Even so, certain data should generally be present in a maintenance cost report. Below are some of them.
Supplies, Parts, and Materials
All activities performed must be listed in full detail. All equipment and work performed on the production line must be closely monitored.
Even if you cannot immediately recall, for example, how many bolts were used last month, this data must be recorded in the maintenance cost report.
Keep in mind that inventory control and logistics management must be rigorous. All equipment received, dispatched, or used must be documented. Those who overlook this end up making poor decisions, putting the production flow at risk.
Production Losses and Disruptions
The primary goal of the maintenance department is to ensure the quality and safety of the production flow. However, unexpected events occur, and you must be ready to resolve them.
Material losses and operational failures happen in any operation, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, a maintenance supervisor committed to demonstrating value to the organization must closely monitor incidents and potential vulnerabilities on the production line.
When something happens, the appropriate corrective actions must be taken as quickly as possible. If a machine stops working, you must have an action plan ready to execute, whether to replace the equipment or swap out a part.
The urgency to resolve the issue is no excuse for failing to document the tools used, the labor hours performed, or the vendors involved.
Workforce
Labor expenses must also be included in the maintenance cost report. At this point, some professionals make the mistake of considering only the payroll, and that is a serious error.
Training sessions, the purchase of safety equipment, and all activities related to the workforce must be catalogued. Keep in mind that every investment you make in improving your employees’ quality of life returns in the form of better results.
It is also important to divide your report into distinct sections:
- by cost centers
- by asset groups
- by execution team
- by maintenance period
- by installation location
The more detailed it is, the more accurate your information will be. For this reason, a generic report should be avoided at all costs in your company. Segment by department, as needed, across all areas.
Is Using Spreadsheets in Maintenance the Best Solution?
Initially, yes. Small operations can manage to consolidate all information in simple spreadsheets. Adopting them and setting aside guesswork is already a major step toward growing the business.
However, over time, the process becomes very labor-intensive, and the team ends up spending more time entering data than planning maintenance activities.
For this reason, it is very important to be prepared to adopt maintenance management and control software. This tool speeds up data collection and analysis, broadening your perspective.
But then another challenge arises: how do you choose among the different options available on the market? Which is the most complete tool? That is exactly what the next section will help you understand better!
Check out our spreadsheets here!
How Can Engeman® Help with Cost Control?
Engeman® is a maintenance planning and control software. Supervisors who use it can easily manage all stages of the maintenance plan, especially when creating and analyzing cost reports.
Since the entire production flow is registered in the system, complete information is available at any time. But how does this work?
Engeman® allows you to:
- control the use of materials, personnel, and supplies.
- send real-time alerts and documents regarding completed work orders.
- schedule the execution of all types of maintenance.
- establish flexible routines.
- measure results with precision.
- create event histories.
This is made possible through modules and versions designed to meet your specific maintenance demands. With cloud, on-premises, mobile, and web access, Engeman® enables your maintenance manager to build a robust strategy backed by reliable data and comprehensive management tools.
By adopting Engeman®, you have all the information about your maintenance management in one place. This makes it possible to optimize expenses and identify bottlenecks more quickly.
What did you think of this content? It became easy to obtain a complete maintenance cost report, didn’t it? Now, discover once and for all a complete solution that is the market leader in the maintenance segment!
Contact our team and get ready to have maintenance management software adapted to your needs today!
