What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive Maintenance is a strategic approach that helps businesses prevent unexpected machine breakdowns, improve asset lifespan, and maintain the production facility through regular inspections and routine maintenance of organizational assets and equipment. A specialized CMMS Software is used for this purpose.
Preventive Maintenance Software allows businesses to anticipate and prevent machine breakdown & age-related failure, determine the appropriate schedules for maintenance activities, and streamline the overall maintenance workflows. Reducing unexpected equipment breakdowns helps keep repair costs lower, improve the equipment’s lifespan & reliability, and ensure it doesn’t pose a risk to humans, the workplace, and the environment.
Benefits of Preventive Maintenance
In today’s fast-paced business environment, companies are adopting a Preventive Maintenance strategy to keep their equipment running longer and ensure continuity in production activity.
1. Reduced Repair Costs
Sudden equipment breakdowns can be costly. Managing periodic maintenance with the ERP software ensures your equipment runs at optimal speed, performance, and health, eliminating sudden breakdowns and limiting your costs on equipment repair.
2. Lower Energy Consumption
Poorly maintained machines tend to use more energy, leading to spikes in the energy bills. Preventive maintenance helps businesses improve machine health, reduce energy consumption, and extend the asset lifespan.
3. Long-term Productivity Gains
Preventive Maintenance helps businesses ensure continuity in production operations, expand production capacity, and meet changing market dynamics. Improved productivity directly translates into higher profit margins and business expansion.
4. Improved Asset Lifespan
Regular scheduled maintenance helps improve the lifespan of your assets and keeps them running and functioning for longer. It ensures your machines run in optimal condition for better longevity and less likelihood of breakdown.
5. Prevent Factory Accidents
Running equipment at optimal conditions and strongly adhering to the Original Equipment Manufacturer’s (OEM) standard allows businesses to prevent unforeseen incidents such as factory accidents, injuries, and deaths. Adequate workplace safety lowers labor turnover and improves employee morale.
Types of Preventive Maintenance
The four types of Preventive Maintenance are usage-based maintenance, time-based maintenance, condition-based maintenance, and prescriptive maintenance.
1. Usage-based Maintenance
This type of maintenance strategy takes the equipment’s usage (such as total runtime, operating hours, etc.) into consideration. It avoids the hassle of over-maintenance as the maintenance tasks are only triggered after a specific usage pattern.
2. Time-based Maintenance
This type of maintenance activity is performed at a fixed interval with the aim of regularly servicing the equipment. Since it doesn’t take the equipment usage into consideration, it increases the likelihood of over-maintenance and downtimes that could have been otherwise avoided.
3. Condition-based Maintenance
This maintenance strategy considers the equipment’s condition (e.g., increased signs of friction, temperature spikes, reduced performance, etc.). Developing such a strategy requires deep planning, expertise, time, and access to real-time data extracted from IoT-based devices.
4. Prescriptive Maintenance
Prescriptive Maintenance places special emphasis not only on predicting potential issues but also on addressing them. Companies use sophisticated algorithms alongside crucial data extracted from sensors to gain deeper insights.
Preventive Maintenance Examples
Now let’s deep dive into the real-life examples of preventive maintenance:
- Equipment Inspections: Checking various machine functionalities such as the Stop button. Testing whether the Stop button actually halts your machine for emergency and workers’ safety.
- Equipment Cleaning: Regular equipment cleaning is essential to ensure it runs at optimum speed and performance. For example, cleaning the air filters on compressors to avoid motor straining.
- Control Energy Consumption: Actively detecting leaks in the compressed air lines to identify and prevent potential leakages.
- Lubricate Rotating: Parts For example, applying grease to conveyor rollers while adopting “Run hours” as the key parameter
- Timely Repair or Replacement: Regular replacement activity of the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) batteries.
Steps to Developing an Effective Preventive Maintenance Framework
The exact steps to developing a framework may depend on the business-to-business. Here are the general guidelines:
- Asset Discovery: Collect information about all the organizational assets and store it in a single place.
- Map Out Asset Requirements: Refer to the user manual of each asset to understand its need for maintenance.
- Define Maintenance Priorities: Highly prioritize the most critical assets, and vice versa.
- Maintenance Interval: Tailor your maintenance plan on a periodic basis (for example, monthly/ annually), or usage-based.
- Develop Maintenance Plan: Develop a strategy for preventive maintenance, lay down the detailed procedure, and prepare safety mechanisms.
- Compare Solutions: Compare different Enterprise Resource Planning system available and choose the one that best suits your maintenance needs.
- Employee Training: Training is vital to ensure the successful completion of the maintenance programs and prevent human errors and accidents.
- Feedback: Track the effectiveness of your earlier maintenance programs, and make corrective changes for better optimization.
When Is Preventive Maintenance Required?
The exact requirement of preventive maintenance will depend upon the criticality of the machine and the operation it is performing. Industry uses various parameters and standards to determine the need for maintenance work. Here is a checklist to help you determine the requirements of maintenance work.
Assets suitable for preventive maintenance
- Have failure mode that can be prevented or lowered by preventive maintenance
- Machines with higher chances of failure that increase with time
- Machines that are critical for operations and regular maintenance can improve lifespan, performance, and workplace safety
Assets unsuitable for preventive maintenance
- Machines that are not critical for operation
- Experiences random failure unrelated to maintenance
- Machines with significantly higher repair costs
Differences Between Corrective Maintenance and Preventive Maintenance
| Aspect | Preventive Maintenance | Corrective Maintenance |
| Purpose | The target is to prevent unexpected breakdowns and downtimes | Perform repair works when the issue arises |
| Timing | Performed at regular intervals following a predetermined schedule (monthly, weekly, etc) | Adhoc and performed when the issue arises |
| Goal | Lower the events of machine failure, improve workplace safety, and prolong the lifespan of equipment | To repair and restore the equipment as quickly as possible |
| Approach | Proactive: Inspections, lubrication, adjustments, etc. | Reactive: Diagnosis, repair, and replacement |
| Cost | Offers better cost advantages in the long run due to fewer breakdowns and improved efficiency | Repair costs can be high because of emergency |
| Equipment Performance | Helps maintain consistent performance by keeping the machines in good condition | Corrective maintenance doesn’t impact the performance of the machine |
| Planning | Requires proactive planning and scheduling of resources and labor | Usually planned and requires immediate action. Performed when the machine breaks down |
| Risk Management | – Helps reduce workplace accidents – Reduces incidents of major failures |
Takes action only when the failure occurs |
| Equipment Longevity | Extends equipment lifespan through regular inspections and repair | May result in equipment failure if neglected |
| Workforce Efficiency | Planned activities lead to better allocation of resources and team | Requires immediate mobilization of resources |
| Documentation | Well-documented maintenance records using maintenance management system | Documents could be lacking or incomplete |
Wrap Up
Companies automate preventive maintenance workflows and get deeper insights into vast assets using advanced tools and technologies. Dimomaint MX CMMS helps businesses enhance the strategic value of their assets and improve their operational reliability. It provides numerous industry-specific capabilities to prevent potential failures even before they happen, and avoid delays, unplanned repairs, & prevent operational disruptions.
Preventive Maintenance FAQs
1. What is Preventive Maintenance?
A simple preventive maintenance meaning is that it is a strategic framework that allows businesses to identify and repair potential issues with their machine through routine checking, periodic examinations, and other activities. The strategy aims to reduce untimely machine breakdowns, minimize production disruptions, and avoid costly repair costs.
2. Which industries use preventive maintenance?
Here are the industries that use preventive maintenance strategies:
- Manufacturing: Manufacturing ERP software is extensively used to track and manage machine maintenance activities and prevent production downtimes.
- Healthcare: Preventive maintenance plays a critical role in building safety and maximizing the reliability of the medical equipment.
- Automotive: ERP for automotive industry enables automotive manufacturers to avoid equipment failure and schedule periodic part replacement.
- Transportation: Improves the strategic value of their physical assets and prevents unexpected equipment failures.
3. What is the difference between Preventive Maintenance and Reactive Maintenance?
Preventive Maintenance aims to catch issues early and maintain the production facility by performing regular scheduled maintenance activities. In contrast, Reactive Maintenance aims to address equipment issues after they have already occurred. In other words, it is a post-failure type of approach that can pose significant risks such as higher repair costs, sudden operational disruptions, and unplanned production downtimes.
4. What is the difference between Preventive Maintenance and Predictive Maintenance?
Preventive Maintenance performs maintenance activities on a fixed schedule, often leading to over-servicing of the equipment. In contrast, Predictive Maintenance uses data analytics and patterns to perform maintenance at the most appropriate time. Whether to choose a preventive or predictive maintenance strategy solely depends on the company’s requirements and industry needs.
