Maintenance isn’t just an expense—it can be a strategic enabler of your print-on-demand business. In this week’s post, I draw from my experience in the heavy equipment industry and Caterpillar’s strategy to explore how predictive maintenance can drastically cut costs and boost machine uptime. Is your business treating maintenance as a burden, or are you using it to maximize productivity and profitability?
Transcript
I grew up in the heavy earth-moving industry, you know, big equipment like caterpillar dozers, 50-ton dump trucks, big excavators. And in the industry there’s been a quiet revolution over the past few years, where maintenance has become a strategic tool in dramatically reducing the cost of running fleets. Caterpillar in particular has led the way by using real-time sensors built into their equipment to enable predicted maintenance instead of following rigid maintenance schedules with fixed service intervals. They dynamically monitor particulate levels in oils and hydraulic fluids to predict maintenance, and the impact has been remarkable. Machine availability is up, yet costs are down. So what’s the analogy for print-on-demand? In my experience most print shots see maintenance as an expense, something to be tolerated rather than a strategic enabler of the business. In the best plans we work with, maintenance is viewed as a combination of start-up, running and shutdown tasks that enable the business to run at the lowest possible cost while minimising machine downtime. These plans treat maintenance as being something that’s dynamic, that is there to maximise productivity. They collect data and they adjust their schedules to run the machines to their peak of performance. So rather than being a boring old topic, a cost that has to be endured, we see maintenance as being a weapon, a vehicle, that enables you to go and run your business more effectively, decreases stress levels, drops your average costs. We’ve got a whole tool that helps you do that. If you’d like to know more about it, reach out, we’d love to talk with you about it. Thank you.
