Businesses have always experienced unexpected equipment failures, and as a business owner or manager, you will face a certain amount of risk regarding asset upkeep and safety. The best way to deal with these downtimes is preventive maintenance (PM). It is a critical component of any company’s maintenance strategies that helps save on costs. Preventative maintenance comes under the purview of CMMS software.
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CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems) helps in establishing a framework for preventive maintenance for asset-heavy industries or organizations. It tracks parameters such as equipment usage and health, repair history and equipment performance. On the basis of insights gained from these criteria, CMMS offers preventative maintenance alerts.
Preventive maintenance is essential to any company looking to reduce maintenance costs and increase equipment life span. But what exactly is it?
What this article covers:
- What is Preventive Maintenance?
- Types
- Reactive vs. Predictive vs. Preventive Maintenance
- Advantages
- Disadvantages
- Creating a Plan
- Creating a Checklist
- How Can Preventive Maintenance Software Help?
- Industries that Benefit
- Conclusion
What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance, or planned maintenance, in simpler terms, is routine and timely maintenance of assets, equipment or vehicles. It is the planning and scheduling of maintenance tasks in advance.
Preventive maintenance examples includes tasks like cleaning, repairs, lubrication, part replacement and adjustments. You perform these activities when equipment is still working; any maintenance performed after equipment breakdown is considered reactive maintenance.
Though maintenance looks like a costly affair, the correct scheduling of preventative maintenance tasks can help you save up to 12–18% on equipment costs versus solely relying on reactive maintenance.
As with every individual, even assets are different from each other and require a more specialized maintenance plan. Every industry and asset will have a set of guidelines that you need to follow. These will be included in the asset manuals or explained to you by manufacturers. You can create a plan based on guidelines, time, condition, previous maintenance activities, and record of past inspections and service information.
You also need to remember to include specific actions to perform before maintenance. For example, if you are going to perform maintenance in a few hours, keeping the machine or equipment off until then is preferable. In such cases, you need to include instructions to turn the equipment off before a set time.
Regular maintenance activities help prevent unplanned downtime, reduce the likelihood of equipment failure and anticipate asset breakdown. If used correctly, preventive maintenance can expand asset life cycles, increase productivity and return on investment (ROI), improve staff safety and environment, and prevent age-related failure.
Examples
Much of the most effective preventative maintenance is focused on electrical and mechanical systems, which have a relatively high replacement cost as compared to their continuous upkeep. However, there are other parts of your plant that could benefit from routine preventative maintenance, some of which have a direct influence on the visitor experience if they fail.
Other examples of preventive maintenance in high-traffic properties, such as hotels, retail establishments, transportation hubs, and office buildings, include:
- Plumbing and sewer systems
- Pool pumps
- Hot water heaters
- Electrical systems
- On-premise computers and software
- Espresso machines in your lobby cafe
- Refrigeration in your kitchen, restaurant and bar
- Carpets in hallways and guest rooms
- Grease traps and floor drains
- Trimming branches and other potentially damaging landscaping
- Pest control
- Changing filters on water systems and drinking fountains
- Inspecting roofs
- Cleaning gutters
- Emergency sprinkler systems
By scheduling regular inspections and streamlining your facility’s maintenance, you’ll get more out of your investments and keep these assets functioning at their maximum potential.
Now that you have an understanding of preventive maintenance let’s discuss its different types.
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Types
- Time-Based Maintenance: As the name explains, any maintenance activity that takes place after a specified time interval is called time-based maintenance. You can create monthly or yearly plans for cleaning, servicing and inspecting.
This type of maintenance is used for vehicles or assets that run on an hourly basis. You can reference manuals to determine the correct time frame for maintenance. This method requires less staffing, as maintenance is always scheduled and automatically created. The only disadvantage is that if the time between maintenance is not correct or maintained, it may lead to equipment failure. - Condition-Based Maintenance: When maintenance of an asset, part or equipment is conducted based on physical condition, it is called condition-based maintenance. The signs include declining performance and changes in vibrations, temperature or sound. According to a study on the airline industry, 70–90% of equipment would benefit from conditioned maintenance.
- Usage-based Maintenance: Post monitoring and tracking asset or equipment usage, you can schedule usage-based maintenance when a certain level of work is completed. It uses meter readings to create work orders automatically or, in some cases, notify the technician after crossing a set benchmark.
Reactive vs. Predictive vs. Preventive Maintenance
Reactive or corrective maintenance occurs when you perform a maintenance task after the failure of a machine. In a way, you are waiting for a small problem to grow big enough that it needs your immediate attention. It’s also called the run to failure method. This increases unexpected downtime repair and replacement costs and cost for overtime labor. It also reduces productivity and hampers your operations.
Predictive maintenance is an advanced form of preventive maintenance that aims to reduce planned maintenance tasks. It helps analyze data from equipment readers, sensors, experts, external assets, IoT, maintenance history and past experiences. This analysis is used to predict when an asset will crash and help create work orders to prevent the crash from happening. You can also monitor conditions, detect possible defects and schedule maintenance tasks.
It’s complex, expensive and requires a lot of invested time. The initial investment in the purchase of new predictive maintenance equipment could cost up to $50,000.
Preventive maintenance is not a blanket term, and despite the similarities, it is very different from reactive and predictive maintenance. Reactive maintenance focuses on tasks after a machine failure, while predictive and preventive maintenance focus on tasks before machine failure.
The idea of both preventive and predictive maintenance is to avoid asset failure. While preventive maintenance is not limited to asset conditions, predictive maintenance uses conditional data collected from IoT devices, sensors and other external sources to help plan maintenance activities.
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Advantages
- Longer Equipment Life Span: Preventive maintenance helps you spot problems earlier, conduct routine maintenance, improve asset life span, track failing parts and use a product to its full potential.
- Reduce Expenses: You can reduce your maintenance costs by allocating resources based on requirements, cutting out unnecessary and costly repairs or replacements, reducing unplanned maintenance activities, and avoiding asset breakdowns. You also need to have a set budget for maintenance; this helps you understand when you need to replace an asset or equipment.
- Decrease Downtime: With regular planned maintenance, you can reduce asset downtime. It allows you to order parts in advance to minimize asset downtime. You can achieve faster repairs, smoother production and a constant profit.
- Improve Safety: If you don’t conduct regular maintenance, it can harm staff and the environment. Preventive maintenance will help you reduce dangerous and catastrophic incidents and create a safer and healthier workspace. Limiting breakdowns and preventing fatal failures and injuries is critical to a safe and flourishing work environment.
- Less Energy Consumption: Assets with low maintenance use more energy and electricity to function. They struggle to stay efficient and increase indirect costs for your company. With regular maintenance, your utility bills will lessen as the assets are efficient and require less energy.
- Increase Productivity: Poor maintenance reduces company productivity as any downtime means a pause in production. Reduced downtime helps improve and increase productivity. Senseye’s ‘True Cost of Downtime’ report suggests that the average cost of one hour of downtime is $532,000.
- Planning: Unplanned maintenance has many overhead costs, including lost production, downtime and replacement or repair cost. Planning maintenance activities ahead helps reduce your company costs. You can gather materials to reduce downtime and focus on production. Planned maintenance also helps you plan your budget and create a safe environment for your employees.
Disadvantages
- Budget Constraints: The initial cost of implementing a preventative maintenance can be high for small and new businesses. To keep up with the latest technology and equipment, companies need to invest more money in software. But over the years, with technological advancements, software has become more affordable.
- Over Maintenance: As preventive maintenance is not only condition-based, you need to keep a check on assets that may not require maintenance. If there is no check, then there is a high possibility that you will be spending on over maintenance which will only add to your problems. You need to maintain a balance between maintenance, over maintenance and reactive maintenance. Without the proper plan, your cost will only increase, and this may directly harm your assets.
- More Resources: Focusing on preventative maintenance, you will need to outsource more supplies, labor and parts. Maintenance is more labor intensive, so someone has to always be available on-site. It means investment for overtime or multiple shifts and additional investment of your time.
- Organizational Difficulties: If it’s a new preventative maintenance system or software that you are installing, then it will take time for everyone in your organization to learn and readjust to it. You need to offer proper training to technicians and those directly involved with the assets. If there are multiple assets, explaining the process and adapting it can be difficult. It is also difficult to create plans for different assets. The more assets you have, the more complicated it will be to track them.
- Time-Consuming: Inspections, checks and maintenance tasks can be tricky and time-consuming. If someone skips out on portions of the main inspection and maintenance tasks, then you may have a possible future failure.
- Tricky to Organize: Preventive maintenance is based on usage, conditions and time, making it a complex process to plan. Manually planning this complex process can be tedious and time-consuming. You need to maintain a balance between too few and too many maintenance tasks. Maintaining multiple assets manually may even seem like an impossible task, but you can overcome this with proper planning and a robust preventative maintenance application.
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Creating a Plan
Maintenance is a good way to increase an asset’s life expectancy, but if the frequency of maintenance increases it can lead to post-maintenance breakdowns. Suddenly, what was meant to prevent downtime becomes the reason your assets are breaking down. You’ll need to find the right balance for your maintenance plan. If it’s more than the required maintenance, then your expenses will increase, and if it’s less, then you will have more failures.
The first thing to do is decide on your goals and how preventive maintenance can help you achieve them. If your focus is to improve production, then it’s better to write it down for you and others to see. This will ensure that you and your teammates are on the same page.
After determining your goals, you need to check and understand all the resources, schedules, employees, assets and maintenance histories a new process will impact. Then you need to create a schedule that accommodates all the requirements like time, condition or usage triggers, present schedules and training for staff members. If you don’t train your employees, they may not understand your plan and the process, resulting in missed steps or ignored checklists. If followed properly, the schedule can result in high productivity and increased efficiency.
- Plan: Decide on a baseline number of maintenance tasks based on recommendations, repair history, usage patterns, current conditions and equipment failure.
- Do: Follow the plan that you created. This will make it easier for your team to understand its significance and adhere to the same protocols.
- Check: You need to keep a check on failure metrics to determine if the plan is working. This is very important, as you would not like to waste time and resources on tasks that won’t benefit you.
- Act: If the system is working, then you can decide to continue, but if you don’t see the desired results, you can adjust the frequency of maintenance tasks again.
This is just one of the ways for you to create a plan. There are many ways that may be more personalized and suitable to you and your organization. You can use any method that makes you feel comfortable. But don’t forget to re-evaluate the plan after a set time to check its effects. If after a few months the results show that your goal hasn’t been achieved, you need to change your approach and create a new plan.
Creating a Checklist
Part of the preventive maintenance planning process allows you to focus on important tasks without putting in too much time. To do that easily, you need a comprehensive maintenance checklist. It will help you streamline the planned maintenance process and reach all your goals.
Before you start creating a checklist, you need to note down all the assets in your organization. Decide which will need regular maintenance to improve performance, and check which assets have replaced parts versus which are using the original parts. You can check equipment manufacturer manuals for their recommendations and include all unique instructions for your assets so as to avoid any missed steps or disasters.
Divide your maintenance tasks into these categories:
- Mandatory/Non-Mandatory Tasks: Mandatory tasks are those that need immediate attention. They are safety-critical and take priority over all other pending maintenance. Non-mandatory tasks don’t have a major impact on asset performance or production, so you can save them for later.
- Pyramiding and Non-Pyramiding Tasks: Pyramiding is when a scheduled task is delayed and overlaps with another scheduled task. At this time, a new task will need to be formed and the old one deleted. The original task should hold the reason for canceling, and the new task should include the old due date to track the overdue maintenance and its effect. Non-pyramiding directly takes the new date as a baseline and does not take note of the missed deadline.
- Inspection and Tasks-Oriented Tasks: Any activity that includes inspection and checking is considered an inspection task. These tasks help check for issues and create work orders for planned maintenance. Task-oriented tasks are when you can make repairs and adjustments during inspections to solve the problem immediately and reduce the need for later repairs.
Once that is done, you can already see which tasks need immediate attention and which can be pushed to a later period. It also lets you see what tasks have been completed and which have been pushed ahead. The above-mentioned categories are some of the basic ones. You can further divide them into more niche categories to suit your company or industry.
How Can Preventive Maintenance Software Help?
Since early times, maintenance activities have been tracked through pen and paper or via spreadsheets. This was very time-consuming, and the results were not accurate. It made it impossible to manage and plan for multiple assets. To make this easier, now you can use preventive maintenance software.
With regular and planned maintenance, you can lessen the impact of equipment failure. You can create work orders online, reduce manual tracking, save maintenance history, streamline maintenance systems, manage administrative tasks, and set reminders and alerts. They help you understand trends, check operational downtime, track repair costs, simplify complex issues and improve equipment life spans. You gain access to maintenance history in a single space, empowering your team to update and view all the data.
CMMS software are products that offer preventive maintenance. They help make task management easier by enabling you to set preventative maintenance tasks based on triggers that automatically create work orders. CMMS platforms collect data and use Artificial Intelligence to create, plan and predict the outcome for you to adjust your plans.
EAM software helps you store and record all asset information, get a holistic view of asset usage, track physical assets and infrastructure, and simplify coordination. You can check inventories and inspection records, prioritize tasks, plan maintenance, send alerts to the right people, improve access and allotment of resources, streamline processes, and reduce tracking time.
Initially, preventative maintenance software was considered as expensive and not easily affordable for smaller companies. But with the recent boost in technology software, they have become more accessible and affordable. Today vendors even offer customized platforms, helping you deal with your problems without any issue.
Industries That Benefit
Hospitality and Restaurant
The hospitality and restaurant industry is client facing and gives high importance to customer safety and satisfaction. They use high-value equipment like walk-in refrigerators and freezers, vehicles, expensive ovens, and more. If they don’t maintain these assets, they would face huge losses. For example, the refrigerators aren’t working properly and the food in them spoils, resulting in revenue and inventory losses. Their problems don’t stop at food wastage. If consumed by a customer, spoiled food can be harmful to their health. This makes it critical to check and maintain all their equipment, as not doing so may pose a risk on someone’s life.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing industries work with huge machines in warehouses and factories. These machines and their parts are very expensive. According to TPC, auto manufacturing companies lose upto $1.3 million per hour that their assets are down. To avoid such hefty losses, they need to create a good preventive maintenance plan. For example, a machine has an error and is only partially filling out boxes. This will result in a huge loss to the company, as they need to refill the boxes and, at the same time, repair their machine.
Fleet Management
Fleet Management is the management of commercial vehicles, like cars, vans, trucks, forklifts and more. You need to make sure you change their oil and filters, conduct regular tune ups and lubricate chassis. Without this, the vehicle may dysfunction putting a hold on your work. For example, if you are delivering some goods and the vehicle has stopped mid-way, you will need to send another vehicle there, pushing other work back. It will delay your work one way or another.
Another real life example would be Trenitalia, an Italian train operator, who had to remove each of its 1,600 trains from service due to unexpected failure. They used onboard sensors and AI technology to maximize their brake pads’ life. They were successful in decreasing their downtime by 5–8%, and they also saved over $100 million per year.
Oil and Gas
This is one of the most important industries. One missed step can be disastrous for the environment and people. It is important to manage conditions of assets remotely as it reduces accidents. This also saves money as there is no need for physical inspections. For example, a leak in a ship can spill oil through the sea, making it harmful for both fish and humans.
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Conclusion
Your assets and machines are very important and need constant care to continue giving you the results you desire. Preventive maintenance is one of the most effective ways to offer this care. By using the knowledge of your machines, their maintenance requirements and the right planning, you will be able to increase their life spans and achieve higher production. You need to decide if you require software or if you can do it manually. Once that decision is made, the process and progress of planned maintenance becomes easier.
How do you plan for preventive maintenance? What do you look for in a system to increase productivity and decrease asset failure? Let us know in the comments below.