Why Preventive Maintenance Can Save Your Company Downtime

Outage and equipment downtime arising due to lack of proper upkeep can cost a company millions of dollars. It is reported that operating a piece of machinery to the failure point can cost a company up to 10 times more than the price of enforcing a standard preventive maintenance plan, according to a study.

With eight in ten businesses reporting at minimum one unscheduled downtime during the last three years, preventive maintenance initiatives are necessary for most companies. But what is preventive maintenance?

Preventive maintenance (PM) is a regular and routine machinery & facility maintenance activity to maintain their optimum operating conditions and avoid any expensive unscheduled downtime from unforeseen system failures.

An effective maintenance plan involves reviewing and arranging the maintenance of the equipment until an issue arises. A successful preventive maintenance strategy also contains maintaining a history of previous audits and the maintenance of facilities.

Due to the difficulty of keeping a track of and managing a preventive maintenance program for a large number of equipment, many businesses utilize preventive maintenance tools to coordinate their necessary maintenance activities.

Types of Preventive Maintenance

As mentioned earlier, any upkeep work that is not responsive can be called preventive maintenance. There are many forms of preventive maintenance that operate in combination with some work order tools and technology to help you stay updated on planned maintenance schedules.

Calendar-Based Maintenance

Calendar-based upkeep is carried out on the premises in accordance with a defined calendar schedule. In a nutshell, time is the catalyst for maintenance activity. CMMS tools are also utilized to keep timelines consistent and to generate repeated assigned tasks when a planned job is due.

Usage-Based Maintenance

Usage-based maintenance uses stimuli based on the current use of every piece of machinery. Monitoring usage with machinery monitors and hours of operation for every machine helps maintenance management to make up a preventive maintenance plan based on predetermined criteria.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance is a type of preventive maintenance and is hugely helpful when utilized in tandem with CMMS software. Recording the data of work order in the CMMS allows the management to evaluate data and find trends in outages over time.

Prescriptive Maintenance

Prescriptive maintenance is comparable to predictive maintenance; however, it uses ML algorithms and the internet of things (IoT) to help organize preventive maintenance activities. Machine learning applications are designed to identify irregularities in the actions of the device during the development process.

How to Design a Preventive Maintenance Program

Preventive maintenance projects carry out a strategic strategy, with preventive maintenance responsible for 60 percent of scheduled maintenance tasks. A successful preventive maintenance strategy contains preparation, organizing, communication, and assistance for continuity throughout the enterprise.

If you are upgrading an existing framework or creating a new one, consider the following questions as you progress through a strategy:

• How much is a breakdown or downtime going to cost the business?
• Which tools and repair strategies should be utilized to predict and minimize losses?
• How often should it be carried out?

Here, we will take a look at how to create a quality preventive maintenance checklist.

1. Ascertain Company’s End Goal

What are you looking to get out of adopting a preventive maintenance schedule? It is critical that the activities and processes of your strategy are structured around business goals.

For example, if your business’s aim is to ensure that it stays compliant, you will want to deliver success, such as improved scheduled maintenance and labor monitoring.

2. Determine Equipment Hierarchy

This move requires taking inventory of all your machinery or capital assets and establishing a hierarchical structure—an arrangement between the most important pieces of machinery and the lesser units. This makes it easier to differentiate among pieces of machinery that can execute maintenance compared to concrete parts.

To evaluate the framework, address the overall ownership costs of each piece of hardware and how security will be affected should the part experience downtime or breakdown. Take notice of any legitimate clusters and establish a guardian-child relation for the appliances. Begin with the position, then define the piece of hardware itself and finally identify the components that make up the resource. For instance:

• Location: Where is the resource located? Consider the venue, the building, and/or space.
• Asset: Assign a name to the piece of equipment.
• Parts: Which parts will work with the asset(s).

A different way to construct a resource hierarchy would be to use the criticality of the machinery. Your department should question which mechanical problems would have the most detrimental impact on production, sales forecasts, or security should they malfunction. These are your highest-ranking possessions.

3. Determine Job Plans

Each preventive maintenance schedule should also include work plans – a list of the assets required to carry out maintenance and repairs. The work plan should provide data on the scope of the work and the equipment and supplies required to conduct the job. Take into account the following in your work plans:

• Stepwise instructions about how to accomplish a repair mission
• A checklist of the tools needed to complete the task
• A collection of unique skills necessary to finish the maintenance work
• A list of products and components
• Useful details such as photos, illustrations, or charts
• Quality operating procedures for the execution of maintenance activities
• Important protection guidelines and procedures to be known when working on the mission

4. Establish Long-Term Scheduling

Whenever it comes to arranging lengthy preventive maintenance, you need to get as many vital assets of yours as you possibly can on time. Utilize the data you have obtained from your structure and criticality strategy meeting to decide when and how to prioritize unique properties.

Establish a yearly maintenance plan for each specified piece of machinery based on the company’s advice, performance and malfunction history, and feedback from your staff. Project regular, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual activities.

5. Establish Short-Term Scheduling

After you have set the most important maintenance work for the current year, you can easily plan your team’s daily duties. Short-term schedules for maintenance work should be aligned with schedules for the long-term to guarantee consistency. Short-term planning tips include:

• Prerequisites for planning: For work plans that require the lowest level of ability, specify the number of individuals and the duration needed to complete the task.
• Develop short-term scheduling plans: Appoint a project manager with duties such as scheduling tasks and organizing assets for work plans that demand the highest level of ability.
• Set criteria for scheduling control: Assess and evaluate performance by looking at the progress of the planning phase.

Conclusion

Preventive maintenance is really a fantastic strategy to reduce unexpected failures of your important machinery. It will save that productive time that is squandered in maintenance work and also guarantees a lot of safety.