Industrial Lubricants: Four Rules to Save More

By: Armando Landavazo / Sebastián Chávez

Suppliers – less is more

A starting point is to review how many suppliers your company currently has.  The reason is simple, every contact with a supplier takes time, and that is why it costs money, a significant sum of money. In fact, you should add the time of meetings, negotiations, and other administrative tasks, such as defining agreements, and price adjustments, in addition to other more practical issues. If you add up all those processes, you put together a significant amount of time.

Consider reviewing your suppliers periodically, it can result in an exercise to define how much money and time you could save.

With the mentality of “less is more”, try to collaborate and get to know the suppliers in depth to define with which you decide to continue working.

Products – less is more

This "less is more" mentality also applies to your products, the more you have in your portfolio, the more time and energy is spent on keeping them organized, which translates into unnecessary costs. Purchase orders, receipt of the product, checking the invoices, all this is an investment of time and increases costs for each product. Again, the key is to conduct an extensive review and narrow down your product range, to keep it simple and save money.

Having different products in circulation increases the risk of misuse, using a product in the wrong place can cost you a lot of money as well.

Oil changes and lubrication points – smarter lubrication

Oil changes cost money and time when emptying and handling old oil, also quoting new products, and making the filling. Commonly, this process takes several hours per machine. The number of lubrication points also affects the time involved in these activities, as does the number of products used.

When we talk about oil change and lubrication points, the key word is documentation. It is necessary to make a preventive maintenance map and save the results, in an Excel sheet, for example. This will serve both for manual instructions and a tool for day-to-day operation. It shows, more intelligently and simply, which products, the amount and intervals used, and how much time was invested in various activities. Work with suppliers that offer these type of lubricant management services in their supply chain, including lubrication management software.

Purchases that pay for themselves

Finally, buy lubricants that pay for themselves, for example, high-performance products. These offer several benefits and help reduce maintenance costs, in the form of:

• Less consumption and longer drainage intervals.
• Reduce the amount of time you need to spend changing lubricants.
• Good lubricants can also reduce energy consumption and have less impact on the environment.
• And most importantly, the optimal state of your equipment, unplanned stoppages due to equipment failure, can be very costly for your company.

Your FUCHS representative can help you with the selection of lubricants according to the unique requirements of your process or equipment. We are holistic solution providers.

You can contact us at any time.