preventive maintenance
preventive maintenance

Preventive Maintenance

Many companies are familiar with preventive maintenance but aren’t familiar with the best practices for planning a comprehensive program. See what works for thousands of facility managers.

What is preventive maintenance?

Preventive maintenance, also known as preventative maintenance, is routine, scheduled inspections and tasks (lubrication, chain or belt adjustments, etc.) performed on assets and equipment to ensure they work the way the manufacturer intended. When executed correctly, preventive maintenance benefits your facilities management strategy by increasing asset lifespans, reducing downtime, and more.

Preventive maintenance should be performed on equipment outside its regular operating hours to not disrupt production or run time. Setting a preventive maintenance schedule for your major equipment ensures high efficiency and productivity in your facilities.

The preventive maintenance workflow

preventive maintenance workflow: 1. identify assets, 2. set time-based or meter-based maintenance intervals, 3. time interval or meter reading is hit, 4. assign maintenance, 5. perform maintenance, 6. run asset as usual, 7. jump back to step 3

The above flowchart is an example of a typical preventive maintenance workflow. However, your organization may add, remove, or adjust steps to fit your unique processes. In general, a preventive maintenance workflow includes the following action items.

Inspection

Inspections are an essential aspect of preventive maintenance as they ensure that equipment is safe for technicians and others to use and that each asset performs as the manufacturer intends.

Detection

Many inspections will turn over very few issues. However, some will yield errors. Finding these errors is called detection, and it’s an essential part of the preventive maintenance process. Without it, equipment will continue running until it fails. This will hinder that asset’s productivity, and its ultimate failure could mean severe consequences to your organization.

Correction

Once you’ve identified an error, it’s important to remedy it. Schedule maintenance for the asset at a time outside of its standard operating time to not affect the asset’s productivity. This tactic allows you to find and fix issues before they worsen or cause a breakdown.

Prevention

Once you resolve the problem, it’s important to inspect your equipment regularly. Another unrelated issue could arise, and inspections play a vital role in detecting them. Schedule your inspections at time or meter-based intervals, depending on the asset.

Watch the video below to see how one organization plans its preventive maintenance tasks to keep operational efficiency as high as possible.

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Types of preventive maintenance

While there are several types of maintenance management, preventive maintenance can be broken down into two basic categories: time-based and meter-based.

Time-based preventive maintenance

This type of preventive maintenance is performed at set intervals of time and is most beneficial for equipment that needs to be serviced based on a calendar schedule. Depending on the PM task, you may need to set up maintenance work and inspections to occur daily, weekly, monthly, semi-annually, annually, or any other time-based maintenance interval.

For instance, manufacturers recommend semi-annual inspections and maintenance on HVAC units—once before the summer and once before the winter. On the other hand, you may want to inspect a piece of equipment that halts production if it fails weekly to ensure everything is operating correctly.

Depending on the task, and your preference, you can choose to schedule recurring tasks based on the day of the week/month (e.g., the 1st of every month) or the last executed date (e.g., 3 months from the previous time the task was completed).

time-based preventive maintenance: identify assets, analyze maintenance records, set time-based maintenance intervals, run asset as usual, asset hits time interval, team is notified, perform necessary maintenance & inspections, run asset as usual

Meter-based preventive maintenance

This type of preventive maintenance doesn’t occur at a set interval of time but rather a set meter reading. Preventive maintenance tasks are triggered for an asset after a certain number of hours operated, miles driven, or production cycles performed.

Whenever the dashboard light in your vehicle turns on, alerting you that it’s time to get your oil changed, this is an example of a meter reading. After a certain number of miles driven, the car alerts you that it’s time to perform preventive maintenance (get the oil changed and filters replaced) on that vehicle. You can see a similar phenomenon in a facility. For instance, when a certain piece of equipment has performed so many cycles, you can have that equipment item alert you that it’s time to perform an inspection.

meter-based preventive maintenance: identify asset, analyze maintenance records & manual, set meter-based maintenance intervals, run asset as usual, asset hits meter reading, team is notified, perform necessary maintenance & inspections, run asset as usual

When to use preventive maintenance

When deciding whether or not to use preventive maintenance, the answer will ultimately depend on the equipment involved. Typically, you want to create preventive maintenance schedules for equipment that:

  • Is critical to the success of your maintenance operation
  • Has failure modes that are preventable with regular maintenance and inspections
  • Is likely to fail more frequently as it ages

The equipment manufacturing guidelines can help you optimize a maintenance schedule to reduce the likelihood of failure.

Critical assets

Certain equipment is pertinent to the success of your operations. Say you work in a restaurant. If your freezer breaks overnight and you don’t catch it, your food spoils, and you cannot serve your customers. In this scenario, the freezer is a critical equipment item that should be inspected and maintained regularly. Depending on your organization, the pieces of equipment you deem critical will vary.

Equipment with preventable failure modes

If you have equipment that fails in consistent ways or after specific periods of time, this is an excellent opportunity to implement preventive maintenance. For example, say a damper on your air handling unit (AHU) fails about every nine months. Performing regular inspections and maintenance every six months should decrease the frequency of these failures.

Aging equipment

No matter your maintenance strategy, old or over-used equipment is more likely to fail than new equipment. As your equipment ages, it’s crucial to revisit schedules and increase frequency as needed. Scheduling preventive maintenance services at specific milestones for the assets is an excellent use of preventive maintenance.

Preventive maintenance vs. other maintenance strategies

Preventive vs. reactive maintenance

As this article focuses on preventive maintenance, it’s important to note the difference between preventive and reactive maintenance. While the two types of preventive maintenance mentioned above focus on inspecting and maintaining equipment before failures occur, corrective maintenance is the complete opposite. This type of maintenance strategy is used to repair already failed assets. A healthy mix (80% preventive, 20% reactive) of these two strategies and others will best set your facilities up for success.

Learn more about reactive maintenance and other types of maintenance management.

Preventive vs. predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance is a more progressive form of preventive maintenance. While both are considered forms of proactive maintenance, predictive maintenance analyzes data and equipment sensors to determine when maintenance is needed. When deciding which maintenance strategy to use, it’s essential to consider several factors such as upfront cost, technology requirements, and team adaptability. Learn more about predictive maintenance to see if it’s suitable for your organization.

Benefits of preventive maintenance

It’s clear that preventive maintenance helps reduce equipment failures and downtime, but there are many other added benefits of performing routine maintenance, like those listed below.

  • Extend asset lifespan and improve equipment reliability
  • Increase safety and reduce the risk of injury
  • Improve planning and resource utilization
  • Decrease unplanned maintenance and inspections
  • Increase productivity and effectiveness
  • Improve audit compliance
  • Decrease costly repairs

Preventive maintenance has the opportunity to transform the way your organization manages its facilities and assets, and the best part is you have the tools to get started at your disposal. Your equipment should have ideal inspection frequencies listed in the manual, and then it’s just a matter of getting routine processes in place to get started! If you’re interested in learning how to get a strategy up and running, stick around. It will be covered shortly!

Learn more about the benefits of preventive maintenance

Challenges in preventive maintenance

One of the challenges of implementing a preventive maintenance program is ensuring you’re performing inspections at optimal timeframes. Performing too much or too little maintenance ultimately wastes time, resources, and money.

Determining an optimal point for your maintenance will take time, so be patient and continue to push yourself to find that sweet spot. Once you do, it will be smooth sailing from there.

maintenance management strategies chart: predictive maintenance strategy lowers repair and preventive costs with a lower total cost when compared to excessive reactive maintenance and excessive preventive maintenance

Designing a preventive maintenance program

The following steps will help you design a preventive maintenance plan based on your unique needs, goals, and assets.

Align your goals to the overall company’s

Every organization has company-wide goals that span years into the future. What are yours? It’s important to consider your preventive maintenance initiatives with these end goals. Leadership is more likely to increase your budget, headcount, and more so long as these added expenses contribute to the company-wide goals.

Gather necessary information

Before laying out a maintenance plan, you must gather information on all your assets. This step may seem easy to skip, but it’s crucial. Information in the equipment manuals will provide you with optimal inspection frequencies and procedures, and maintenance histories will help you understand how reliable an asset is and how frequently it breaks down. You should also gather serial codes so that the correct ones are ordered if an asset fails and needs replacement parts.

Rank your assets based on criticality

Determining which assets deserve your attention the most is crucial for a preventive maintenance program. You can’t set up plans for every asset upfront, so you have to prioritize your list.

Begin by taking inventory of your assets, and then ask yourself three questions about each item.

  1. What is the consequence of this asset failing? Does it halt production, harm the environment, and put staff at risk?
  2. How reliable is the asset? Is it constantly breaking down, or does it seem to have little to no problems? The key here is to understand whether or not this asset is at risk of failing and causing the consequences listed above.
  3. How detectable are issues on this asset? If an asset had a problem, would you be able to find it quickly, or would several of your processes be jeopardized before the issue is detected?

Answers to the above questions should help you prioritize plans for your assets. For instance, an asset that is very unreliable with dire consequences after failure and an extremely low detection rate would need to be put at the top of your list. On the other hand, an asset that is pretty reliable with little to no impact on your business after failure and a high detection rate should be put at the bottom of your priority list.

Establish job and labor resources

Establishing resources, time, labor, and other requirements for each preventive maintenance task is important. This allows managers to easily assign tasks based on a technician’s skillset and availability. Together, these insights will create a job plan for each asset.

The components of a good job plan include:

  • The spare parts inventory associated with the asset
  • Step-by-step instruction sets for inspecting the asset
  • Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) manual
  • Photos, images, interactive maps, or other documents related to the asset
  • Maintenance and repair history
  • Critical safety instructions

Create preventive maintenance checklists

Establishing a preventive maintenance checklist or instruction set for each asset is an excellent way to ensure your maintenance team is properly executing each step in the preventive maintenance process. Here are six free checklists to get you started!

Establish long-term plans

Look at the priority list you made after evaluating every asset’s criticality. This will guide which assets to set long-term schedules for first. Based on each asset’s manufacturer recommendations and reliability, set up recurring maintenance to occur at time-based intervals or meter readings. If setting time-based intervals, ensure these span the next few years.

Unexpected setbacks may require you to intervene and adjust these long-term plans. However, it’s important to establish an outline that you and your team can stick to. If you need to change these plans in the future, follow the same structure as above to ensure you’re optimizing each asset’s plan.

Establish short-term plans

Once you establish long-term plans, you can plan what your week-to-week will look like. It will most likely be a combination of reactive maintenance tasks and preventive maintenance tasks, but be sure to create a buffer of time for unplanned equipment failures or projects that require more time than anticipated.

Train your entire team

Your team needs to understand what the goals of your preventive maintenance plan are and how to achieve them. You must provide thorough training sessions on all the processes you have in place. If you have software or tools to support these initiatives, the team should be educated on how to use those tools to achieve success effectively.

Having each maintenance technician execute a preventive maintenance task is an excellent way to gauge their understanding of the process. They are working on these workflows daily, so it’s up to you to provide them with the information and support they need to perform successfully.

Track and adjust

Preventive maintenance is an iterative process. You should revisit each asset’s plan to track progress and data and adjust the process as needed. If a piece of equipment is receiving care every six months but is still experiencing shutdowns, you may need to increase the inspections to every three months.

Continuously looking for ways to improve your processes takes a little extra time but pays off in the long run.

How CMMS software can help you manage preventive maintenance

Many organizations use CMMS software to optimize their preventive maintenance workflows. The system becomes a centralized database for all of your assets, equipment, and workflows to live.

A CMMS allows you to manage your entire PM lifecycle easily:

  • Design a PM program
  • Create preventive maintenance schedules according to time-based or meter-based intervals
  • Keep track of each maintenance activity that is upcoming or overdue
  • Keep your team on schedule with alerts and notifications
  • Make future decisions by analyzing equipment data collected over time

Learn more about preventive maintenance software

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