What Is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance helps gyms avoid costly breakdowns by using routine inspections, servicing, and replacements before failures happen.
What Is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance (PM) is a proactive approach to maintaining equipment and facilities. It involves routine inspections, servicing, and minor repairs before complete breakdowns occur. Instead of fixing machines and equipment after total failure, preventive maintenance prioritizes repeated interventions to extend asset life, reduce downtime, and lower input costs.
For gyms in particular, preventive maintenance is a key procedure in helping maintain the quality of their equipment and floor. Treadmills, weights, machines, and floors all experience heavy daily usage. It is therefore extremely important to keep all assets functionally operating, as even one breakdown can lead to poorer member experience, increased liability risk, and incur costly emergency repairs.
How does Preventive Maintenance work?
Successful preventive maintenance operations will typically run on a scheduled, structured cycle:
- Inspection
- Possibly the most important part of maintenance, making sure that machines are functioning and there are no irregularities in performance.
- Servicing
- Lubricating parts, cleaning components, tightening bolts, and other measures to ensure equipment is protected from complete malfunction.
- Replacement
- Swapping parts before failure (e.g. cables, clips, pins, etc.)
- Documentation
- Recording all inspection data and logs in a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) that gives intuitive, integrated data summaries on a unified platform.
- Effective modern PM programs will rely on data-driven monitoring, integrating with gym maintenance software.
Why is Preventive Maintenance important for gyms?
Preventive maintenance offers a myriad of benefits for gym owners, helping to maximize operations and profitability.
Saving Costs
- By performing regular check-ups on gym equipment, gyms can save up to 40% on maintenance compared to reactive measures (relying on fixes after complete breakdowns).
- PM also adds up to 2-3 years on high-usage assets, helping extend the lifespan of machine investments for the long-term.
- Reduced downtime preserves optimal productivity for floors and gym facilities.
Member Retention
- Well-maintained gym equipment improves member satisfaction and experience, incentivizing renewal.
- Employing preventive maintenance can give gyms a comparative advantage to other market competitors that rely on reactive maintenance.
- 72% of fitness businesses that employed data-driven systems reported increased rates for member retention.
PM is ultimately a long-term investment that helps gyms with operational stability and increased profit margins. It is an essential practice for maximizing gym equipment, facilities, and floors, leading to improved member satisfaction.
Getting Started with Preventive Maintenance
OnSight combines radar sensing technologies and a live dashboard to offer a simple, unified solution to preventive maintenance for gym owners. Our service was built specifically to help gym owners with floor maintenance, member retention, and extending asset life.
The easily integrable, one-time install sensors allow gym staff to view maintenance schedules, machine usage, and a floor heatmap that offer live analytics at a single glance. OnSight also notifies workers with real-time updates when it detects irregularities, reducing the necessity for manual inspections with an integrated cloud solution.
Check out how OnSight can save costs in real time or book a free demo today to get started on improving your gym for the long-term!