Easy Ways to Reduce Maintenance Costs in Your Warehouse

Maintenance costs can really drain your budget.

That’s because a lot of these expenses are more than they should be or could be avoided altogether by following some fairly simple and easy guidelines. If you’ve been allocating a lot of your budget towards maintenance, here are a few different things you can do to help reduce those costs.

Train Your Employees

Many maintenance costs come from employees breaking things or using tools incorrectly. You want to make sure everyone knows how to use the equipment in the right way. Doing so, not only may help lower maintenance costs, but also helps avoid accidents and injury.

Also make sure to train on proper equipment maintenance, or hire a maintenance staff. This is important, because if maintenance isn’t done correctly, it can further damage equipment.

Perform Regular Preventative Maintenance

Another way of avoiding high maintenance costs is to perform regular, low-cost maintenance. It’s often much cheaper to replace or repair small issues than it is to wait until they become a major problem.

Optimize Space

Look at the amount of warehouse shelving you have and how it’s being utilized. You may be able to rearrange or reallocate some of this space to reduce your maintenance costs.

Do you have the space to increase your shelving vertically? If you remove some shorter shelving and replace it with taller units, you have fewer shelves to maintain but can hold the same amount of product.

Know When to Replace Equipment and Tools

Sometimes, it saves you money to hold on to older tools until they break or are too worn out to keep. Other times, though, it’s much more efficient to replace equipment.

Sometimes, manufacturers replace older models and stop supporting them. It can then be very expensive and time-consuming to find places that still offer parts for this equipment. If you replace it with something new instead of continuing to perform costly maintenance, you will often come out ahead.

Analyze your Maintenance Expenses

Don’t just pay for maintenance and move on. At the end of your fiscal year, if not before, take a good hard look at where your entire maintenance budget is going.

Why are you spending money on certain things?

Is there any expenditure you could cut?

You can’t really make a plan to reduce your maintenance costs unless you know exactly what those costs are. Once you see where the money is going, you can begin to see what is truly essential maintenance and what isn’t.