Preventive Maintenance: A Comprehensive Guide

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance (or preventative maintenance) is regularly performed maintenance on equipment to reduce the likelihood of failure. It's performed while the equipment is still operational to prevent unexpected breakdowns. Preventive maintenance is planned to ensure the availability of required resources. The maintenance is scheduled based on time or usage triggers.

Examples of Preventive Maintenance Schedules:

• Time-Based: An air conditioner serviced annually before summer.
• Usage-Based: A motor vehicle scheduled for service every 10,000 kilometers.

Preventive maintenance requires more coordination than run-to-failure maintenance due to its planned schedule. However, it's less complex than predictive maintenance, as it doesn't involve planning monitoring strategies or interpreting results.

Suitable Applications for Preventive Maintenance

Applications well-suited for preventive maintenance include those that:

• Have a critical operational function.
• Have failure modes preventable (and not increased) by regular maintenance.
• Have a likelihood of failure that increases with time or use.

Advantages of Preventive Maintenance

Compared with Less Complex Strategies:

Planning is the most significant advantage of preventive maintenance over less complex strategies. Unplanned, reactive maintenance incurs overhead costs avoidable through planning. These costs include:

• Lost production
• Higher costs for parts and shipping
• Time lost responding to emergencies
• Diagnosing faults during equipment downtime

Planning maintenance reduces these costs. Equipment shutdown can coincide with production downtime. Necessary parts, supplies, and personnel can be arranged beforehand to minimize repair time, thus decreasing the total maintenance cost.

Safety improves because equipment breakdowns are less frequent compared to less complex strategies.

Compared with More Complex Strategies:

Preventive maintenance doesn't require condition-based monitoring, eliminating the need for:

• Conducting condition monitoring
• Interpreting condition monitoring data and acting on the results
• Owning and using condition monitoring equipment