SERVICE AND MAINTENANCE
Taking care of business
It doesn’t matter how much you spend on your equipment if you neglect to get it serviced or train your staff on how to maintain it
L
ooking after equipment is an absolute essential. There are two parts: day-to- day maintenance and regular servicing. If you want equipment to operate safely and efficiently, then you need to ensure both are covered. Training is the key to day-to-day mainte- nance. Staff misuse is still the biggest cause of service call-outs, so make sure everyone knows how to operate and clean all appliances. Also make sure they understand the significance of any warning alerts that the machine may flash up, and know to respond to them right away. Manufacturers and suppliers should be willing to train your staff. Often, especially with larger appliances, they will come in not
LII | The Caterer | 16 November 2018
only when equipment is installed but also on a regular basis for refreshment training and when new staff are employed. How often does your equipment need regu- lar servicing by a trained engineer? That will depend on the appliance and on the level of use, but typi- cally it will be twice a year. In a busy commercial kitchen, equip- ment may still break down at some point, however well looked after it is. When choosing your service provider, you need to know how soon they will visit in an emergency. However, more important is the
expected ‘first time fix rate’ – it’s no use an engineer turning up inside four hours but then not being able to fix things because they don’t have the right parts.
PAIN: REDUCING OVERHEADS AND RUNNING COSTS Operators are always looking at ways of reducing costs as much as possible. While this is an important skill to develop, you need to make sure you’re not creating the possibility of bigger expenses down the line. For example, in a busy kitchen, routine
procedures need to be followed. While you may keep most things clean, the devil is in the detail and it can be easy for staff to forget the seemingly minor parts of the cleaning routine. This could cause issues ranging from mechanical malfunctions to food poisoning. When you’re training your staff, you should include cleaning as part of that, and impress on them the importance of maintaining even the fiddly parts. Similarly, putting in a schedule of regular planned preventative maintenance will help you to head off larger problems, ensuring you get many years of use out of your kit. It should be obvious by now that the initial expense of an after-sales service agreement is worth the cost. It will be cheaper than ad hoc repairs
or, heaven forbid, the premature full replacement of an appliance.
www.thecaterer.com
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