How To Perform Office Equipment Maintenance Checks
Office equipment maintenance checks need to be performed to ensure all of your equipment is correctly working. If you lease your equipment, maintenance will be included as part of your contract, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t perform checks.
Remember, having someone come repair equipment costs time and money, but you can catch small problems before they become major problems with preventative maintenance. Routinely performing these checks will ensure your equipment is in working condition, allowing your business to run efficiently.
Why is Preventative Maintenance Important?
Preventative maintenance can ensure your business can remain efficient, save money, and keep your employees active throughout the day. Here’s why preventative maintenance is important.
Saves Money
Ensuring your equipment is working properly can help you save money on costly repairs and replacements. If your copier breaks down, you’ll have to buy a new one or pay a company to fix it. However, you’ll also lose money due to employee downtime.
Improves Efficiency
Ensuring your office equipment is in proper working order at all times will prevent downtime and improve overall office efficiency. If your printer goes down, your employees won’t be able to finish tasks. However, when the printer is working well, all of your employees can continue to work their hardest.
How to Perform Office Equipment Maintenance Checks
Remember, when many people use the same equipment every day, they can wear down at a fast rate. Maintenance checks allow you to slow the wear that comes from daily use and prevent costly problems, repairs, and even replacements. Here’s how to perform office equipment maintenance checks.
Organize Employees
Everyone in your business should check the equipment they use daily to ensure it’s properly working. You’ll need to designate jobs for your employees and ask them all to contribute so machinery can optimally perform. Maintenance tasks can be split up, or there can be general rules about how to use the machines. For example, let your employees know that if they see the printer is out of paper or ink, they should immediately replace the paper or ink. They should also know to keep the equipment clean and dust-free.
You should also have an employee who is in charge of calling a repair company when something breaks down. Make sure this person has all of the numbers they’ll need for each piece of equipment written down and stored on or in their desk. Then, tell all of your employees to go to that person if something breaks down.
Stop Ignoring Alerts
Equipment maintenance is easy, thanks to software and technology that will alert you when something needs to be taken care of. For example, printers make a beeping sound when they’re out of paper to alert you to immediately fill them back up. Alerts can also pop up on screens that remind you when something has to be done. When you’re in the middle of important work, it can be easy to ignore these alerts. However, ignoring tech alerts can result in the costly mistake of simply letting equipment break.
Get the Right Tools
Instead of waiting for equipment to break down, you should have the right tools to test business equipment to ensure it’s in proper working order. You can set a routine maintenance schedule for every six months and rent equipment testing tools to ensure everything is in proper working condition, safe to use, and can help your staff stay productive.
Schedule Maintenance
Maintenance should occur on a strict schedule and regular basis so you can be alerted of any problems. Preventative maintenance saves your small business money because it prevents you from having to buy new equipment. Create a schedule for your employees to follow and perform.
Don’t Forget About Cleaning
Checking to ensure that equipment is working properly is important, but you should also aim to keep the equipment clean. Dust that gets into office equipment can force it to stop working or break down. If something breaks down due to dust, a repairman might open up the machine and simply find that it’s dirty. With a quick cleaning, he’ll have fixed the machine, and you’ll have paid hundreds of dollars for someone to fix something that could have been prevented.
Your employees should be responsible for cleaning all of the office equipment they use, or you can hire a cleaning company that can dust off all of the office equipment to ensure nothing gets inside the machines.
When cleaning the machines, ensure your employees follow the instructions provided by the manufacturer for each machine. It’s unwise to use sprays on electronics, so you should have a supply closet that has the right cleaning supplies your employees need to clean their computers, printers, and even the coffee machine.
Follow the Instructions for Preventative Maintenance
All of your office equipment, from the office desks to copiers, will come with cleaning and maintenance instructions, along with a troubleshooting guide so you can handle minor problems on your own. Keep the equipment manuals near the machines so employees know what they need to do to perform preventative maintenance.
Creating a Maintenance Program
A maintenance program allows you to continue using equipment and understand when something has gone wrong that is impacting how that equipment works. Quickly implementing a process for maintenance doesn’t have to be difficult. Instead, you can share a spreadsheet with all of your team so they can make notes about their maintenance roles.
For example, if the person in charge of checking to ensure the copier works every day finds a problem, they can immediately report the problem on the spreadsheet and make a note about what they did to fix it. That way, if someone else notices the problem, they can check the spreadsheet to determine whether or not it has already been addressed.
Office managers should create a preventative maintenance program and share it with their employees to ensure equipment doesn’t break. It should also address what to do when equipment breaks down or stops working.
Matt Casadona
Matt Casadona has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Psychology. Matt is passionate about marketing and business strategy and enjoys San Diego life, traveling, and music.
