Everything You Need To Know About Preventive Maintenance

You cannot eliminate the risk of equipment failure – they will take place. But, you can minimize equipment breakdown, ensure workers’ safety, and save big on unnecessary expenses. How? With preventive maintenance (PM). It prolongs the lifespan of the building assets, equipment, and infrastructure, the reason why most facility managers are looking forward to increasing PM in their building operations.

To successfully implement a preventive maintenance program, you need to have adequate knowledge about this technology, master the main aspects, and determine which PM system is accurate for your facility.

The purpose behind implementing preventive maintenance

Routine checkup of equipment is something that not every facility takes care of. As a result, they have to bear the costly expenses of unplanned machine downtime. Effective preventive maintenance saves facility managers from these hassles by providing real-time data insights and timely checkups of equipment performance. As a result, facilities will be able to achieve:

• Reduced equipment breakdown
• Minimum wastage of time, efforts, and resources on equipment repairs
• The increased life span of assets and equipment
• Predict corrective maintenance interventions
• Minimized consumption of energy, lubricants, and consumables
• Reduced equipment maintenance budget
• Enhanced working conditions of the facility managers
• Limited risk of serious accidents

It encourages facility managers to leverage smart technology and make the most out of the PM program. Laying the foundation for successful facility management starts with the implementation of progressive, new-age, and advanced technology. Preventive maintenance comes on the list.

Why must every facility look forward to preventive maintenance?

No company likes to spend unnecessarily on equipment failures and unplanned downtime. You must want the same, right?A well-curated and well-implemented PM program can help to achieve this goal. It can maximize your investments by slowing down excess asset depreciation, deterioration, and malfunction. Not just this, it maintains a high safety for the staff and allows you to avoid costly equipment repairs. In short, a well-functioning preventive maintenance program makes sure that the facility’s operational disruptions are kept to a minimum.

Know the difference between preventive, corrective, and reactive maintenance

Most users are still unaware of the preventive maintenance program. They mistakenly perceive it as corrective or reactive maintenance. The PM program is way ahead of them!

• Reactive maintenance is not conducted proactively. It’s done when the problem goes out of control or the asset actually breaks down. That’s why it’s often called run-to-failure maintenance. Please don’t rely on this default maintenance strategy if you want to avoid costly equipment repair.
• Corrective maintenance solves the problem of equipment failure. Most companies rely on this asset maintenance strategy. Though, it’s not an ideal solution for optimal equipment functioning.
• Preventive maintenance is the best among them! It helps you organize and prioritize equipment maintenance tasks that allow the technician to create the best working condition and life span for the equipment. It takes care of routine checks and tasks to ensure proper asset functioning and identify the possible weaknesses before the problem turns big.

For better reliability of equipment, minimal asset downtime, and reduced expenses on equipment failure, you must prioritize preventive maintenance.

Why is the implementation of preventive maintenance still at a low scale?

Plant Engineering conducted a survey in 2019 about facilities maintenance. It states that more than half of the respondents still rely on reactive maintenance for equipment. Only 1/3rd of facility managers are practicing preventive maintenance for 30+ hours weekly.

Most maintenance departments don’t have good asset management systems making it difficult for them to adopt new or progressive technologies. With increasing assets and limited staff, the implementation of the PM program seems to be a big task. Most facilities can’t leverage this technology without having a proper plan in place. Complex interfaces, lack of functionality, and high price tags of PM programs are some other reasons why users hesitate to go ahead with this much-needed equipment maintenance program.

Please keep one thing in mind: You’ll not be able to achieve the goal of creating connected buildings if you don’t leverage the benefits of the PM program for asset management. It may sound intimidating in the beginning. Once you know how to apply it, you’ll be able to take the operational efficiency of your equipment to the top-notch level!

How to successfully create a preventive maintenance plan?

Lack of knowledge about the proper implementation of preventive maintenance can stop you from getting the most out of this proactive technology. You must know how to create a PM plan that will help you overcome poor equipment performance, asset downtime, and costly repair expenses. How to do it??

A well-curated preventive maintenance plan is all about knowing the equipment demands and performance that can help you schedule maintenance tasks when it’s actually required. You just need to get the right balance – “Not too early, not too late.”

Follow the PDCA model to successfully plan a preventive maintenance schedule:

• Plan: Make a baseline for PM frequencies after considering recommended OEM guidelines, asset repair histories, usage patterns, and equipment failure rates.
• Do: Stick to your plan for accurate results.
• Check: Have a look at failure metrics for every asset to know whether a plan is working or not.
• Act: Increase the frequency of PMs if the equipment is breaking down during maintenance activity. You can even reduce the frequency if there are not any equipment failures between PMs.

You must take the help of a IoT based  automation to plan preventive maintenance. Otherwise, it can become a bit challenging for you. This system sets triggers that are appropriate for each piece of equipment.

Zenatix helps organizations to gather data on preventive maintenance or optimize activities and sets maintenance KPIs to bring in the efficiency of the assets. Save big without compromising on the performance of assets with our technologically advanced solutions. Reach out to us today to successfully implement this proactive equipment maintenance strategy.