Design for service: Improving machine serviceability
Preventive maintenance is all about detecting service and replacement needs proactively, while avoiding unplanned downtime or breakage. The reward of well-performed preventive maintenance is increased reliability and safety of the machine. The challenge is that it can be hard to appreciate the value of things that didn’t go wrong, as measures taken to prevent failures pay off in the form of reliability.
Puja Alempur, Maintenance Design Engineer, has worked in Kalmar's Global Service Solutions team since 2025, bringing to his job 16 years of prior work experience in the service and reliability industry. In his position, he works with maintenance design, which involves representing maintenance with Kalmar's product development so the serviceability of the machines is considered from the design phase up.
When doing preventive maintenance, it's essential that the maintenance tasks are specific, customised for the machine in question, and followed meticulously.
"Our job is to create maintenance instructions that are tailored for each specific equipment model, and to ensure that they are also validated in real life", Puja says.
Maximising safety and sustainability
The goal for Puja and his colleagues is that every maintenance task for Kalmar machines would be risk assessed to ensure that when a technician is performing the task, the work goes forward safely, smoothly and as efficiently as possible.
Kalmar's maintenance design team works to ensure that technicians all around the world have access to the latest documentation and procedures for each machine type. "Any new findings, potential new risks, or changes in requirements need to be updated into the maintenance instructions and made available to everyone that needs them," Puja says.
In addition to ensuring safe and uninterrupted operation, well-performed preventive maintenance also improves sustainability. "Good preventive maintenance contributes directly to the reliability of the machine, which in turn affects sustainability," Puja notes. "For example, if a part that is due for replacement is left unnoticed or ignored, it could lead to equipment damage that will require more extensive replacements of parts and components."
Ensuring smooth maintenance
As always, safety is the key priority, and much of Puja's work involves making sure that technicians are not exposed to unnecessary risks in the course of their work. The goal of maintenance design is to investigate any potential hazards and to make sure that before the work is commissioned, all required instructions, safety procedures and warnings are documented and communicated for each specific task.
"My personal motivation is the end user experience," Puja says.
"Our job is to look after Kalmar's field technicians who work around the world, often in challenging field conditions. We do our best to ensure that their work can be done on machines that are designed to be easily maintainable and pleasant to work on. It's all about ensuring safety for everyone working around the machine, while simultaneously maximising the cost-effective uptime of our customers' equipment fleets."
View video of Puja at our Vuosaari workshop with Service Technician Petra Keituri
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