PMs
b'Back at you with Warehouse and Operations as a Career, I\\u2019m Marty and I have no idea what all I\\u2019d like to talk about today! I\\u2019m way behind again on our Q & A but I haven\\u2019t really pulled up anything. You know what, lets start off with our PM\\u2019s or the preventative maintenance programs or duties. You may not know it, but our facilities keep pretty accurate records regarding the maintenance performed on our equipment. That\\u2019s one reason our pre-trips are such a big deal, our maintenance technicians use those to address the day to day issues we document. I was looking at a weeks\\u2019 worth of pre-trip reports today on a spotter tractor. Its shared between two people, one works Sun, Mon, Tue and early Wednesday and the other works late Wednesday, Thur, Fri and Saturday. So, on Tue one gentleman marked that the wipers and mirrors needed attention and the other guy, on his shift, marked everything as o.k. Same thing happened on Wed but in the morning the sliding window needed attention and later on in the afternoon the next pre-trip was filled out as everything being fine! I know its so easy to take those couple of minutes for granted but they are truly important. If our unit, say an electric rider jack or our reach lift is squealing a little and its almost time for the regularly scheduled maintenance they may bring it in earlier than scheduled and put us some new brushes in it. We all love how our equipment runs after the electric motors have been cleaned out and brand-new brushes have been put in right? For those still utilizing brushes anyway. I say our preventative maintenance programs are important but actually they may even be regulated. We deserve to be operating safe equipment at all times! A good PM program will check things like Fluid levels, tires & wheels, how do we dent so many wheels on our counterbalance lift, all our hydraulic connections, battery life and water levels, our steering boxes, load wheels, masts, chains, oh and one of the most important things for me is torqueing all our nuts, bolts and screws. Anyone ever heard a bolt hit the ground and couldn\\u2019t find where it came from. And on all our electric equipment everything needs to be kept tight. Bad brushes can ruin our motors, and the same thing with loads wheels. I\\u2019ve had to dig miles and miles of twisted up shrink wrap from drive and load wheels before. There\\u2019s a lot of parts that need lubrication too. Most preventative maintenance programs are written with either hours of use or clocked in hours as a scheduling indicator. All this is important!
\\nWith all that being understood, as a supervisor sometimes it\\u2019s hard to pull a piece of equipment out of the operations to get caught up on our scheduled PM\\u2019s. But I assure you it\\u2019s the thing to do. I myself held a pallet jack or kept it on the floor for like 3 weeks over its hours mark and ended up ruining the battery. It was down for over two weeks then as they had to not only replace the battery but a lot of the voltage wiring to it as well. Just this week I had a facility call me complaining about having to purchase a $5k battery for their forklift. The water level had been dry for what they assumed to be over 2 months. Besides the expense it\\u2019ll be down now until the battery is built and arrives. Of course, that pointed to bad pre-trips. They discovered every operator had just been marking that the water levels were good. You can bet they\\u2019ll be some discussions and re-training with that crew now.
\\nSo, pre-trips, let\\u2019s talk about that for a minute. They do become routine to us. But their main purpose is our safety. Our preventative maintenance programs are designed and written for our Safety. Yes, these programs will help reduce expense and keep our machines running longer, but they deliver us operators a safe unit to perform our task with! A good pre-trip will cover http://media.ehs.uconn.edu/Occupational/GeneralSafety/LiftTruckOperatorsPre-OperationChecklist-Elect...'