AWP Equipment Maintenance: Ensuring a Safe, Efficient Workplace

With a lasting economic downturn, it’s more important than ever to ensure that you stay on budget and within deadlines. And while some delays are inevitable – those caused by extreme weather, for example – it’s preventing the preventable that’s crucial for maintaining efficiency. So smart contractors and managers are increasingly focusing on proper equipment maintenance and operator training to diminish the risk of costly downtime.

Take Aerial Work Platform (AWP) equipment, for example. On a large construction project, you may have as many as five workers relying on a single piece of equipment, such as a 60-foot boom. If the boom is non-functioning – and can’t be repaired or replaced for four hours – you quickly begin accruing costs. In fact, employee downtime alone could total more than $1,600. But that’s only one consequence. The effects of an unusable boom or scissor lift extend far beyond just the bottom line. Indeed, failing to maintain your AWP equipment will affect a range of your company’s operations, impacting productivity, worker safety, profitability, and most significantly, your company’s reputation.

As a result, proper and thorough equipment maintenance should be a routine business function – an essential “best practices” protocol. And whether you own or rent equipment, there are a number of options – ones that are neither time-consuming nor prohibitively expensive – requiring minimal resource allocation that ensures the proper maintenance of your equipment.

Nine Essential Aerial Lift Equipment Maintenance Considerations

1. Safety First
Worker safety should be priority No. 1 ??? an unwavering focus on eliminating workplace injuries. While OSHA standards provide the minimum safety requirements, with more than 212,000 on-the-job injuries in the U.S. due to falls in 2009, clearly, more can be done. If you rent AWP equipment, choose a rental company with a reputation built on safety ??? one that never settles for only meeting the minimum standards. For instance, having decals on your equipment verifying you have documentation for the required annual inspection can be crucial to ensuring your employees’ safety and providing OSHA with great documentation rapidly in the event of an inspection. It can set the tone for your job site inspection. Make sure your rental company never settles for minimum standards. Your workers depend on it.

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