One of the things that you know about being a landscaper is that there is a lot of equipment that you need to use. You have trucks, trailers, and all of the equipment like lawnmowers, chainsaws, and other things. So, it’s maintaining landscaping equipment should be a priority. Below are 5 tips that you can use for maintaining landscaping equipment.
Maintaining Landscaping Equipment Tip 1 – Create Reminders According to Equipment Use
With a lot of landscaping that you have to remember, it’s possible that you aren’t going to know when something’s broken until your crew’s out on one of the jobs. Whether there’s a backup solution in place, equipment that is broken will negatively impact your productivity. It also will create operation delays.
Rather than needing to quickly react and get a replacement tool to the job site or quickly make repairs, creating schedules for maintenance will let you monitor the health of your equipment and avoid having job downtime.
When you use software for managing your landscaping equipment, it’s possible to set maintenance schedules for all of the equipment. You also can use reminders to let you know when maintenance is upcoming. This will let you schedule the maintenance during your off-hours, keep the equipment working well and help it keep working for longer.
To help with saving more time, it’s possible to manage your service reminders by creating some service programs. This lets you bulk manage them. standardizing your service reminders will let you stay organized and maximize your time.
Maintaining Landscaping Equipment Tip 2 – Uncover Issues by Conducting Routine Inspections
Even though doing preventative maintenance regularly is a good way that you can ensure the health of your equipment, it’s also essential that your crew is monitoring the conditions of equipment each day. When you have the team do equipment inspections daily, it’s going to keep you informed about the status of the equipment and help with uncovering any type of underlying issues you need to address.
A landscape equipment app will help your team with inspecting the equipment thoroughly and quickly. Rather than having a lot of paper forms, a mobile inspection can be done quickly using a few swipes and clicks, making sure that the team is still able to arrive at the jobs on schedule.
The old inspection forms made of paper also are very inefficient for communicating problems. Rather than finding out about a problem when the form is turned in, days and sometimes even weeks later, the results from a mobile inspection are instantly uploaded into the cloud-based software. They then can be accessed by a mobile device or computer. When there’s equipment that fails inspection, the fleet manager will receive a notification instantly through email so that they can schedule maintenance quickly and make some informed decisions.
Because there’s a variety of assets that you’re managing, this type of software will let you tailor the inspection forms to any kind of equipment. The administrators also can make different inspections based on the equipment type and make fields for items such as the air filter of a mower or the teeth of the chainsaw.
Maintaining Landscaping Equipment Tip 3 – Collaborate Seamlessly with the Team to Help Resolve Issues
As the manager of a fleet, you’re relying on the team to help you with identifying and resolving issues with your landscaping equipment. Frequent status updates and communication can give you the necessary visibility. It also can help you with making informed decisions about equipment replacement and maintenance.
Because your landscaping team often acts as your ears and eyes, a mobile solution for equipment management’s the very best way that you can remain connected with your teams, communicate any tasks and receive any updates. Managing all of your maintenance for your landscaping equipment on one platform will centralize the information and help with making sure everyone’s on the same page.
Does certain equipment or vehicles have maintenance through third-party vendors? Streamlining the communication through this kind of software will help you with avoiding playing tag with those shops, quickly approving the service, and tracking the repair progress.
Monitoring the productivity of the technicians can help you know when the repairs are going to be done and when your equipment can be used again. Using this type of software lets you subscribe to the issues with equipment and get push notifications alerting you of the updates that are surrounding the problem.
Maintaining Landscaping Equipment Tip 4 – Use Through Work Orders for Tracking Maintenance Progress
There are occasional issues popping up even when you are performing preventative maintenance on a regular basis. Tracking the repair progress as it happens and monitoring expenses and parts can be frustrating when you still use spreadsheets and paper. These kinds of methods won’t have the ability to combine the data and provide you with a total view of the maintenance expenses and productivity.
Using landscaping maintenance software will help you with automating workflows. It also will help you by giving you a thorough view of the repairs from the beginning to the end. Managers are able to create as well as track the work orders to communicate issues easily to technicians, no matter if they’re service providers through a third party or in-house.
A work order will let you track the service down to each line item. This helps with making sure that the repairs get made within your budget and on time. Clearly communicating your needs using work orders will help keep your technicians and you in agreement to quickly complete the repairs and avoid any surprises.
Maintaining Landscaping Equipment Tip 5 – Monitor the Maintenance Expenses & TCO
Because maintenance’s one of your biggest ongoing expenses, it’s a good idea to have a proactive strategy for equipment maintenance. This will help with lengthening your equipment’s lifespan and avoiding downtime. When you take proactive measures, such as performing inspections and creating reminders for service, you’ll be able to effectively monitor your maintenance expenses and avoid costly replacements of equipment.
Keying in the line items into your spreadsheets and going through your repair bills wastes a lot of time. Along with delaying other tasks, doing data entry this way can cause errors, which can lead to bigger problems down the line.
When you manage your maintenance using central software, it will automate your expense tracking as well as give you an accurate picture of operating costs and the TCO of the fleet. With fleet reports that you can configure, you’re able to view expense reports in real-time, monitor your fleet’s maintenance trends, and make some informed decisions so that your business’s bottom line is improved.
These are five tips that you should remember when it comes to maintaining landscaping equipment. They will help your life be a lot more simple.
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