Get on top of your preventative maintenance

Preventive maintenance (or preventative maintenance) is maintenance that is regularly performed on a piece of equipment to lessen the likelihood of it failing. It is performed while the equipment is still working so that it does not break down unexpectedly. In terms of the complexity of this maintenance strategy, it falls between reactive (or run-to-failure) maintenance and predictive maintenance.

Time-based preventive maintenance

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A typical example of a time-based preventive maintenance trigger is a regular inspection on a critical piece of equipment that would severely impact production in the event of a breakdown.

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Usage-based preventive maintenance

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Usage-based triggers fire after a certain amount of kilometres, hours, or production cycles. An example of this trigger is a motor-vehicle which might be scheduled for service every 10,000km.

Assets suitable for preventive maintenance include those that:

• Have a critical operational function

• Have failure modes that can be prevented (and not increased) with regular maintenance

• Have a likelihood of failure that increases with time or use

Planning preventive maintenance without the help of CMMS software can be a huge challenge. Since PMs are triggered after a certain amount of time or use, it’s difficult (if not near impossible) to track that data manually, especially if you’re dealing with many pieces of critical equipment. Maintenance software allows you to set PMs according to the triggers that are appropriate for each piece of equipment. Once the trigger occurs, a work order will be created.

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Maintenance software also allows organizations to gather data surrounding PM activities to report on or optimize those activities, and set maintenance KPIs to work towards.

Advantages compared with less complex strategies

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Planning is the biggest advantage of a preventive maintenance program over less complex strategies. Unplanned, reactive maintenance has many overhead costs that can be avoided during the planning process. The cost of unplanned maintenance includes lost production, higher costs for parts and shipping, as well as time lost responding to emergencies and diagnosing faults while equipment is not working. Unplanned maintenance typically costs three to nine times more than planned maintenance. When maintenance is planned, each of these costs can be reduced. Equipment can be shut down to coincide with production downtime. Prior to the shutdown, any required parts, supplies and personnel can be gathered to minimize the time taken for a repair. These measures decrease the total cost of the maintenance. Safety is also improved because equipment breaks down less often than in less complex strategies.

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Advantages compared with more complex strategies

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A preventive maintenance program does not require condition-based monitoring. This eliminates the need (and cost) to conduct and interpret condition monitoring data and act on the results of that interpretation. It also eliminates the need to own and use condition monitoring equipment.

Preventive maintenance, or PM, is regular, planned maintenance that is scheduled according to usage or time-based triggers. The purpose of PM is to lessen the likelihood of equipment breakdowns. There are many instances in which preventive is the best maintenance strategy to use, and it’s much easier to carry out a PM strategy with the help of maintenance software.