Why Preventive Maintenance is the Way to Go
Less equipment downtime, longer asset life, and improved overall equipment effectiveness – these are some of the benefits preventive maintenance can bring to manufacturers. Add cloud software to the mix for a solid maintenance strategy that will enable your team and equipment to run at their best.
The easiest way to think about preventive maintenance is by imagining a car.
You can let your car run until it breaks down and then take it to get fixed. This is reactive maintenance.
Or you can bring the car into the shop every three months, after 10,000 miles, or at another regular interval recommended by the car’s manual to get the oil changed, the battery examined, and the tires swapped. This is preventive maintenance.
Preventive maintenance can be scheduled on a time, usage, or condition-based trigger. Let's consider an example for each:
- Time-based preventive maintenance
A time-based approach schedules a preventive maintenance task using a set time interval, such as every 10 days. Other examples include triggering preventive maintenance on the first day of every month or once in a three-month period.
- Usage-based preventive maintenance
Usage-based preventive maintenance triggers a maintenance action when asset usage hits a certain benchmark. This can include after a certain number of miles, hours, or production cycles. An example of this trigger is routine maintenance being scheduled on a motor vehicle every 10,000 miles.
- Condition-based preventive maintenance
Condition-based maintenance is a form of proactive maintenance which monitors the actual condition of an asset to determine what maintenance task must be done.
Condition-based maintenance dictates that maintenance should only be performed when certain indicators show signs of decreasing performance or upcoming failure. For example, preventive maintenance will be scheduled when vibration on a certain component reaches a certain threshold, indicating that it should be replaced or lubricated.
While preventive maintenance is not the answer each time, it does have many advantages over a purely reactive program. For one, reactive maintenance costs three to nine times more than preventive maintenance because of factors including lost production, rush shipping, time wasted on emergencies and diagnosing faults.
In addition, reactive repairs take longer, drain resources, and interfere with preventive work because too much time is spent diagnosing the problem. And if a problem isn’t repaired correctly, the issue can reoccur, causing more downtime.
Lastly, technicians are 28% more likely to have an accident when work is reactive according to IDCON. That’s because technicians are often under pressure to repair things quickly. This can cause them to take risks they would not have taken if they had the time to review safety requirements and complete the job safely.
How to establish preventive maintenance at your operation
Creating a preventive maintenance program requires you to change the way your operation thinks and acts. The three main areas where this change must happen are with your people, processes, and technology.
- People: Create a proactive mindset
For every policy, plan or task, someone has to execute it. That is why every successful preventive maintenance program starts with people. Everyone should understand how preventive maintenance works, why it’s important, and their role in making it successful.
- Processes: Create clarity and consistency
Processes are guidelines for what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. For example, a process will outline what to do if an inspection of an asset fails or how to submit purchase orders for new parts.
Processes set a standard for preventive maintenance tasks, so they are done right, done safely, and done the same way every time.
- Technology: Create efficiency
Maintenance technology is a tool that helps connect the team to each other and the information it needs to make preventive maintenance successful. It helps avoid many of the time-wasters that threaten a preventive maintenance plan, like sorting through paper forms, getting work requests at random, and constantly writing and rewriting plans.
