Car wash maintenance is inevitable. And perhaps it feels easier to wait and see what needs fixing – you want your focus on your customers and wash uptime, after all. However, in this world of increased competition and customer expectations, waiting is the privilege of the invincible. A consistent, efficient and proactive preventative maintenance plan will increase your uptime and customer satisfaction, decrease your overall maintenance expenses and, ultimately, increase profits. You wouldn’t wait and see what happens to your car when you don’t change the oil; the same is true for your business, even if you are busy washing cars every day.

The “why” is straightforward – save money, make customers happy and keep your car wash up and running. Nevertheless, preventative maintenance is a complex business philosophy, and getting started can feel overwhelming. The first secret to create a successful preventative maintenance plan is to take the time to classify. Not every piece of equipment in your wash is created equal, and without some sort of hierarchy, you will be constantly putting out fires with no clear direction and little control. Classifying gives you power to know where to allocate your time, money and staff resources.

The classification approach may well be obvious to the owner or experienced operator, but it’s often not that obvious to the newer and less seasoned members of our teams. There are two questions that you and your staff need to ask, in order to classify your equipment and prioritize your maintenance efforts:

What’s critical?

An obvious example is the conveyer belt. When it stops working, you aren’t washing any cars – and not making any money. Therefore, a conveyer belt is critical to your operation and should be placed at the top of the equipment hierarchy. But, you may have 12 blowers, and while you always want to deliver the highest quality wash, if one is down you are still drying cars at 92 percent efficiency and your wash stays open. A single blower is not critical to your operation.

Categorize each piece of equipment as “critical” or “non-critical” by asking if you can stay open without it and how it affects wash quality. Taking the time to classify the equipment in your wash allows you to appropriately prioritize your maintenance efforts. You need your critical equipment to be working at all times to stay open; the non-critical equipment has some wiggle room when it comes to scheduling maintenance.

How well is it working?

After creating the equipment hierarchy, you need to determine how well the equipment is currently working. A piece of equipment could be working well which lowers its preventative maintenance priority. It could be working, but the high-pitched squealing noise it makes is a fair indication that it will break soon. Or, it could be broken in which case you certainly should prioritize fixing it to ensure wash quality and uptime.

An effective and repeatable preventative maintenance plan requires that this classification approach should be more than just a mental list; document your equipment hierarchy so you have it as a guide for the prioritization of your preventative maintenance tasks so that others can execute it effectively. Or better yet, implement a maintenance management system to automate the process and improve consistency and visibility. Things will still break at inconvenient times, but by classifying, you are not just running around fixing problems. You have the beginning of a plan that allows you to solve problems and drive savings long-term.

Plan and Prioritize

Some form of organization may seem intuitive, but without specific classification, any preventative maintenance schedule you create will fall apart faster than your equipment. Classification is a foundational secret of an effective preventative maintenance plan, allowing you to prioritize your resources; take the time now to organize, implement systems and reap the long-term business benefits. Over time, the result is a more proactively managed operation, a reduction in maintenance costs and an increase in uptime and customer satisfaction.

For more information and tips on operating a successful carwash, we invite you to listen to The How of Car Washing podcast and the Car Wash Manager’s Minute. The How of Car Washing podcast is a free on-demand audio program focused on helping you start, operate and grow your car wash business and you can find it at www.TheHowOfCarwashing.com.