Achieving Zero Downtime Monthly and Annual Preventative Maintenance By Anthony Analetto Chief Operating Officer - SONNY'S The Car Wash Factory Originally published in AutoLaundry Magazine WATCH Car Wash Equipment Selection

If you subscribe to the belief that “in the real world” things are too hectic to methodically carry out scheduled preventative maintenance (PM), you are potentially leaving tens of thousands of dollars in lost profit on the table. For the most part, the mysterious gremlins that cause breakdowns on busy Saturdays can almost always be traced back to a weak PM program. Car wash equipment is inherently durable. When properly maintained you should expect zero downtime and many years of trouble free service.

For those of you who carefully log each item in your wash and perform the recommended maintenance according to each manufacturer’s documentation on the exact day the service is due, stop reading and continue what you are doing. That is the ideal that everyone should strive toward. This rough overview of PM is for those of us who wait until we suspect something is about to break before servicing it. If you fall into that category and are looking to reduce repair and downtime expense with an easy to implement routine, I hope you find some helpful pointers below.

Successful PM is a Weekly Habit
In a perfect world, each and every item in your car wash would have an odometer. PM would be performed for each piece of equipment individually as directed at a pre-determined number of cars. Since this is nearly impossible, manufacturers instead recommend PM on weekly, monthly, biannual, or annual intervals. Juggling which items need to be serviced on which day can become tedious. Adding or replacing items over time quickly adds to the confusion. Needless to say it often seems less expensive to abandon the comprehensive PM program entirely. This can be a costly mistake.

The first battle to developing an effective PM routine is to eliminate the question of when the next PM is scheduled. Some form of PM should occur on the same day every week. Pick a slower day, when everyone involved is available and not too exhausted to be effective. Another method is to do PM the same night you pull time cards. This means that if your work week starts on Thursday, every Wednesday night, time cards are pulled at the end of the day. Whoever puts the time cards in the envelope is required to insert the initialed PM checklist and sign the outside of the envelope indicating that all activities were completed. Using the time cards is a great trigger to remember PM, and associating the process with paychecks often elevates the perceived importance of the task for everyone at the wash.

Once everyone knows automatically that “tonight is PM night” and approaches it with the question “what do we have to do?” you have a solid foundation to enact a successful program. Last month I addressed Daily PM and you should have a checklist made. Now you simply have to list all of the weekly, monthly, biannual, and annual services necessary for the equipment in your wash. (continued on next page ...)