Why You Should Ditch Excel’s Preventative Maintenance Templates

Many companies understand the importance of maintenance when it comes to keeping their equipment working. Those who have already tried their hand at creating a plan will rely on preventative maintenance templates in Excel. While this is better than no plan at all, this method is still subject to several errors.

Even if you are an Excel guru, with a clear understanding of formulas and tables, Excel falls short in keeping track of important information. Most spreadsheet programs are hard to access on mobile devices, and even if you use a cloud-based platform like Google Drive, they might not display properly for everyone who tries to access them.

Using Excel makes it hard to track work orders and prioritize different types of maintenance. Unless most of your assets require the same type of maintenance on the same schedule, using a spreadsheet to track each of them will require more work than it's worth. There are too many variables at play to track neatly in Excel.

It might be tempting to download and customize any one of several preventative maintenance templates created for use in a spreadsheet program. Especially when several of these templates are available at no extra cost, it can seem like a bargain you can't beat. But when you take into account all of the areas in which a spreadsheet is prone to errors, suddenly it doesn't seem worth pursuing.

Spreadsheets are difficult to find specific information. When you need to reference the maintenance information of a specific piece of equipment, you can spend a lot of time scrolling through entries and tabs. It's also easy to put the asset information in the wrong place. There's no easy way to check for errors, and if something was put in wrong, it can complicate maintenance records.

When your information is stored in a dense format, it can be nearly impossible to analyze the data you have available. Analyzing this information can help you improve several aspects of your business. You can identify busy times and down times and schedule asset maintenance during the slower hours to optimize your company's work flow. You can also discover which assets experience more use, and therefore need more maintenance than less used equipment.

Spreadsheets also make it difficult for you to find areas in which you can cut costs. Since the information is formatted in an unintuitive way, it's difficult for you to see which vendors have better prices. Using any sort of comparison method to evaluate your data may be downright impossible because of the way Excel displays your information.

Asset Panda delivers a more intuitive and easily understandable way of formatting your information. You'll never need to scroll through asset entries, or spend time you don't have looking for maintenance records for a specific piece of equipment. Our platform makes it easy for you to look at asset performance over time and use that information to make better decisions about your company's repair process. You can also pull up asset records side by side to see when they are more likely to be used, and which assets are more popular in your company.

We designed Asset Panda to make it easy for you to maintain your assets. Excel is complicated, and is the source of many a headache for those in administration. With Asset Panda, keeping your equipment in top condition doesn't have to be your job alone. Our cloud based software makes it easy for all of your employees to help keep asset records accurate and up to date.

Want to try out Asset Panda before you commit? Sign up for a free 14-day trial!