If you have gone to the trouble to install loading bay equipment, keeping it in tip-top condition makes sense to prevent it from letting you down or causing an accident as much as possible. There is never a good time for a breakdown, so it always pays to do as much as possible to prevent the chances of it happening.
Regular routine maintenance of all equipment is essential, yet loading bays can often get overlooked. After all, why bother if it is still working, but the reality is you could be storing up more extensive problems for safety and continued use if you ignore the small but routine maintenance measures you should give to all of your equipment, especially essentials such as loading bay equipment, that could cause injury and business disruption if neglected.
Outsourcing the maintenance and servicing of your loading bay equipment
Fen-Bay Services is one such company that offers servicing and maintenance solutions for loading bay and docking equipment as well as manufacturing, supplying and installing loading bay equipment and technical support to help keep your business running and your loading bay equipment operating happily. Finding the right team of professionals with experience in loading bay solutions is essential to ensure that important things are not missed, forgotten, or left to your workforce to remember.
Why Regular Maintenance Matters
Reasons to keep up with servicing and maintaining your loading bay equipment include:
Safety – safety can quickly become a nightmare on a loading bay if routine checks and servicing are not carried out in a timely manner. Lighting, barriers and guard rails, and attention to moving parts regularly are essential to prevent trips, slips and falls or worse.
Efficiency – a well-oiled machine will perform more efficiently than one that is never looked over to check that all safety features and moving parts are operating as they should.
Reliability – much like a car, loading bay equipment is more reliable if attention is paid to it regularly, whether that’s greasing moving parts, changing the oil and checking everything runs smoothly. Your car won’t go on forever without regular and routine maintenance, nor will your load bay equipment.
Prolonging lifespan – when your loading bay is appropriately maintained, it is less likely to suffer breakdowns or catastrophic wear and tear that shortens its life. Routine servicing will help prolong the lifespan of your loading equipment and reduce the likelihood of breakdowns and repairs over time.
Reducing costs – repairs can be costly for businesses, not just for the cost of the repair, but for the disruption to regular operations too. An urgent call out to fix your loading bay equipment through something that regular servicing and maintenance could fix is likely more expensive than the costs involved with taking routine care of all your dock and loading bay essentials.
Health and safety legislation – Finally, the Health and Safety Executive offers guidance on the actions required to ensure that machinery and equipment are safe to use. They go so far as to suggest that for high-risk and complex equipment, competent persons must carry out maintenance, and as such, may be best carried out by the manufacturer or specialist contractors and that it is expected that arrangements are in place to inspect all equipment and plant machinery with safety-critical features. Poorly carried out or unsafe maintenance results in many severe injuries and fatalities. Having the correct procedures and expertise to ensure appropriate maintenance of work equipment and machinery is essential.
It’s likely that your staff are already fully employed with the logistics and operations of keeping your business on track each day, so it’s not surprising that your maintenance teams are often too busy to handle some of the yearly or half-yearly checks and preventive maintenance measures your loading bay equipment requires. However, maintenance and servicing is essential, so whether you rejig your in-house staff or outsource to a professional company, you can make sure you’ve less chance of something going wrong.