Preventive maintenance is probably the most neglected type of maintenance. Yet it can make a big difference to your business. It allows you to prevent unexpected equipment incidents that can affect your business.
Why plan preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is important for any business, as it helps preserve the operating capabilities of equipment and improve the efficiency of a business. There are many benefits to performing preventive maintenance rather than corrective maintenance:
- Increase the life span of the equipment
- Reduce the probability of in-service failures
- Reduce downtime in case of failure
- Prevent and also anticipate costly corrective maintenance interventions
- Improve the working conditions of the production staff
- Reduce the maintenance budget
- Avoiding the causes of accidents
Ensuring quality
Preventive maintenance planning helps review best practices and methodologies to improve performance.
ISO 9001 is recognized as the international standard for Quality Management Systems (QMS). For a company to be ISO 9001 certified, it is necessary to have a preventive maintenance plan.
This certification adds credibility to your company’s image, as it sets benchmarks to ensure that companies produce and sell quality products.
Types of preventive maintenance
Regardless of the type of preventive maintenance, the goal is always to limit expenses caused by unexpected breakdowns and downtime.
Systematic preventive maintenance
Systematic maintenance is based on the automatic replacement of certain parts according to a specific schedule. It allows components and parts to be replaced on a regular basis, which improves equipment productivity and increases its lifespan.
Systematic maintenance can be performed at predefined intervals, or according to an agreed-upon usage criteria. It is necessary to have a good knowledge of the rules of degradation to determine the ideal frequency of maintenance of the parts.
Conditional preventive maintenance
Conditional maintenance is based on the verification and observation of certain parameters. It consists of monitoring the parameters and key indicators of the equipment’s operation in order to make the necessary adjustments and corrections to anticipate any breakdown or malfunction.
Unlike systematic maintenance, this type of maintenance does not require any additional knowledge. It is sufficient to compare the results of the checks with the predefined thresholds.
Forecast Preventive maintenance (PM)
Predictive maintenance allows companies to anticipate problems by planning the necessary maintenance actions based on predictions. It requires extrapolating future risks of deterioration.
It is carried out using estimates following analysis and evaluation of the parameters. It is a costly maintenance, which requires sophisticated tools. That is why it is only applied to elements that are critical from a safety and cost point of view for the company.
Steps to take care of your equipment
A preventive maintenance plan is a document that consolidates the procedures, resources and planning of equipment maintenance tasks. Here’s how to do it:
- Establish the list of equipment
Make a list of all your equipment. - Identify critical points
Make a list of critical points where major breakage or premature wear could occur. - Establish a maintenance schedule
Analyze the information gathered in the next step to produce a list of actions to be performed and their ideal frequency. Tasks must also be assigned. - Implementation
Perform maintenance or repair - Updating files
Note the day the changes were made on the equipment for follow-up.
Choose professional tools
The use of software allows you to track, schedule and perform preventive maintenance efficiently to keep your equipment running smoothly.
To keep your business running smoothly and reduce maintenance costs, it is important to have a preventive maintenance plan in place now.
With Hector software, it is possible to schedule maintenance and repairs for each of your assets. Receive alerts on your home page and keep a detailed history of your maintenance!
You will also be able to assign tasks (inspection, repair, cleaning) to your employees and they will be able to indicate the condition of the equipment in the system, as well as add documentation on maintenance (invoices…).
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Use an inventory management system to schedule your preventive maintenance!
Hector helps you set up your preventive maintenance plan with its maintenance alert and tracking system.