The importance of maintenance in your logistics company

Both in everyday life and the business world, for things to work properly, we must provide them with regular maintenance. We all know how delays in any part of the supply chain can cause major problems and incur additional delays in the rest of the logistics processes that result in a poor customer experience.

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An aspect that is often overlooked, but which plays an important role in preventing the supply chain from collapsing, is maintenance management in your logistics company. One way or another, you can connect maintenance activities with every stop in your production process.

Whether in transportation, production, or storage, the failure of a maintenance team can be felt throughout the supply chain. The objective of this article is to explore in more detail the role of maintenance in your logistics company.

Maintenance in transportation

Transportation is an essential part of any supply chain, whether it's moving raw materials to a warehouse or distributing finished goods to the consumer. For this instance of the chain to run smoothly, there is a lot of maintenance work that needs to be done behind the scenes.

First of all, if you want to deliver materials/goods to a designated location and on time, your mode of transportation must be able to support the route without critical failure. This is the part where you expect the ship, train, aircraft, and fleet maintenance managers to have done their share of the work to ensure successful delivery.

Secondly, it is not surprising that certain materials/products have to be transported under special conditions. For example, one thing to keep in mind is that freezing food prolongs shelf life and prevents deterioration of flavor, texture, color, and vitamin content.

Quick freezing after harvest retains vitamin C levels in vegetables and provides consumers with safe, high-quality products. For this reason, refrigeration is key to supply chain improvements to meet consumer demand for a wide selection of fresh, nutrient-rich, and longer-lasting produce.

It's not hard to see how equipment like refrigerators should also receive regular maintenance, as their failure can mess up the order and cause significant delays in your supply chain.

Maintenance in production

If there is one stage in the supply chain where maintenance gets the recognition it deserves, it is on the production area of most operating plants.

There are two main philosophies used in maintenance management. A reactive approach that waits for a device to break before having it fixed or replaced outright, and a multitude of proactive approaches that focus on predicting failures and performing preventative maintenance work.

As you can imagine, the preventative approach should be an option for any plant that wants to minimize the chances of becoming the cause of delay due to unscheduled asset downtime.

With that in mind, maintenance managers are slowly but steadily turning to the proactive approach to preventative maintenance. The most ambitious organizations might try to implement full predictive maintenance to minimize unexpected downtime, while an average facility will generally settle for implementing a preventative maintenance strategy.

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Storage and warehouse maintenance

At some point in the supply chain, whether it's materials or finished products, chances are that some should spend a night or two safely stored in a warehouse. However, for everything to be optimally protected, the following conditions must be met:

• Machinery, such as forklifts, must work correctly;
• The warehouse itself needs to be properly maintained (while it may seem trivial, things like broken lamps, slippery floors, unstable shelves, etc. can lead to damage to stored goods);
• Again, refrigerators and similar purpose items must operate properly.

While you may not often think about it, every asset and item that was ever part of your supply chain was at some point under the care of a maintenance technician, meaning that without regular maintenance intervention, your logistics processes would be plagued by constant failures, which would result in delays, cost overruns, product deliveries in unfavorable conditions.

Customer delivery maintenance

Even when your product arrives at the store, the role of maintenance in your logistics company does not disappear. Responsibility simply shifts to the facility manager for that store. To get the products into the hands of the customer, the store needs to operate under normal conditions.

If the store is closed because it has a leaky pipe or a broken roof, the chain will not be able to close. While that may happen on rare occasions, it is often something that could have been prevented and avoided. Also, if the store is not properly maintained, a host of other problems can arise.

All this takes on an even greater dimension if the product must be kept under certain conditions (temperature/light/humidity, etc.). Fortunately, maintaining a shop is much less demanding than maintaining a production line, so even if you don't experience these problems firsthand, you should keep in mind that problems can't be avoided and that someone works in the shadows to keep everything running smoothly.

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As you may have noticed, maintenance in your logistics company is connected to each step of the supply chain. While different industries will have different maintenance needs tied to other domains, it is interesting to look at how necessary good maintenance is to keep a healthy supply chain.