How To Create an Astounding Preventive Maintenance Plan?
Updated: Jan 22
Preventive maintenance focuses on inspection, detection, correction, and prevention, which is a proactive approach to maintaining equipment. Consider how each of these concepts contributes to a preventive maintenance program's effectiveness.
Preventive maintenance relies heavily on inspections because they offer two benefits. Checking the equipment at the facility is foremost important for its proper functioning. By conducting regular inspections, a company can prevent workplace injuries and enhance its liability protection. By conducting regular inspections, a company protects its properties. The inspections ensure the equipment operates according to the manufacturer's specifications.
Facility managers need to take a proactive approach to maintenance rather than waiting for problems to arise, which can cost them a great deal of money. Facility managers can detect issues early on because preventive maintenance helps detect problems while they're still cheap and easy to resolve.
Facility managers should engage in preventive maintenance programs to keep equipment in good working order and to recognize and prevent problems before they occur. Facility managers respond quickly to problems (or potentially problematic activities) before they worsen or shut down operations.
Maintenance records and inspection records can be used by facility managers to avoid repeating mistakes and improve equipment performance. Keeping equipment from breaking down reduces stress and boosts productivity for facilities staff. When equipment is functioning as expected, maintenance staff can devote their efforts to preventative (rather than reactive) maintenance.
What is the difference- Reactive vs Preventive Maintenance?
In contrast, reactive maintenance takes place when it is not performed proactively or on a regular schedule. Facilities management tasks are typically classified according to whether they are reactive or preventive. Understanding the difference between reactive and preventive maintenance is crucial to driving a successful facilities department. If you perform too much reactive maintenance, your workers may feel anxious and overwhelmed. Because of this, it's critical to create a PM program that prioritizes preventive maintenance (PM) and reduces the risk of reactive maintenance.
Reactive maintenance
Reactive maintenance begins after an asset has malfunctioned or broken down, aiming to diagnose and repair the issue. Reactive maintenance entails waiting for minor issues to escalate into major issues before taking action. Maintenance professionals determine the source of a problem and take action to return the asset to working condition.
Preventive Maintenance (PM)
PM (Preventive Maintenance) refers to the practice of performing preventive maintenance procedures regularly. Maintenance that is planned extends the life of the company's assets, equipment, and infrastructure. A preventative maintenance program includes adjustments, cleaning, lubrication, repair, and replacement. By using this method, unplanned downtime, maintenance costs, and failures are actively reduced.
Create a Preventative Maintenance Plan
Preventive maintenance has indisputable advantages. It can be frustrating to facility managers when they don't know where to start with preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance workflows are a fundamental component of proactive maintenance operations.
A well-designed workflow lays out a plan for how and when to maintain assets. Unsurprisingly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to getting started.
In some businesses, assets are classified one by one and checklists are generated as needed. A more sophisticated facility often builds substantial asset inventories before implementing maintenance recommendations into procedures and work orders.
Establish your Objectives
Making your preventive maintenance plan truly beneficial starts with establishing your objectives. Exactly what do you aim for? In what ways we can reduce downtime, improve asset reliability, lower costs, or increase planned maintenance frequency? What have you done to date to achieve these objectives? Where have you failed? This is where you should start your diagnostic process.
Choose a Format
The top three methods for arranging maintenance systems are digital technologies, internal spreadsheets, and paper records. In today's world, as we integrate digital technologies, the ideal approach is to digitally store all of your information, from checklists to asset histories, and make it paperless.
In your preventative maintenance workflow, you should ask questions such as these:
What is the most important duty to complete first?
What is the location of the equipment?
Certain workers should be assigned to which tasks?
How frequently should the task be completed?
What parts or materials are required?
How will we ensure that we are held accountable?
A user-friendly digital maintenance solution would benefit the majority of businesses even if spreadsheets suffice for tiny businesses.
Location-based Asset Mapping
By using location-based asset mapping, software users can select assets based on an interactive floor plan map, so they can see only the assets they need. As part of a preventive maintenance program, a team member can use this feature to inspect or service all assets of a certain type that is assigned and help increases better response time.
Asset Master
It is crucial that you map your assets, i.e., group assets according to their equipment families and locations. To ensure that each asset meets quality standards, warranties and recommendations by the manufacturer should be linked.
Asset Document Repository
The software offers facility document management to protect your most critical building information and give you instant access to the field. In addition to O&M manuals, warranty information, receipts, and commissioning reports, you can upload and store any document.
Prioritize your Tasks
Resources and time are both limited. Due to budget constraints, you will likely not have time to perform all the preventive maintenance you would like, so be sure to prioritize the most critical assets. Prioritizing should be determined according to the equipment's current condition. Risk assessments can help rank the priority level of each asset. Identify the assets that are crucial to the business, those that can cause the highest losses, and those that can pose the greatest risk should they fail.
Work order and PM scheduling
Scheduling preventive maintenance and managing work orders is easy with software. Checklists can be based on time intervals - daily, weekly, monthly - and a robust software program will make sure they appear as planned. Incoming service requests can be categorized by building or floor, work orders can be assigned to team members and upcoming maintenance tasks can be automatically notified. When a manager inputs how often checks should be completed once, he or she never has to consult user manuals, spreadsheets, or colleagues again to determine when to complete maintenance.
Central Dashboard and Mobility
Data-driven facility managers seek proof of success (or need for improvement) through a dashboard that tracks departmental data in a single view. By using facility management software, you can get your team up and moving throughout the day. For preventive maintenance tasks, FMS functions on any mobile device and eliminates the need to print out work orders. QR codes can be placed on assets and equipment in a facility. Mobile devices with cameras are the best way to scan QR codes. You will be able to access the PM history of any asset, as well as any upcoming maintenance tasks when you scan the QR Code.
Define KPI and Continuous Improvement Plan
A maintenance manager needs to be able to monitor events over time to determine whether the plan is achieving its objectives. Performance indicators (KPIs) are the best way to accomplish this, which will be discussed later in the assessment and review section of the plan. Everything can be improved. Make progressive improvements to the plan based on the results you get (measured using the KPIs you defined).
Let’s Wrap up
Identifying assets and cross-checking them with recommended repairs or inspections is a challenging aspect of creating a maintenance plan. With significant numbers of assets, it is almost impossible to organize the full inventory. Maintenance management software can automate most preventative maintenance work orders.
We not only provide you with a way to catalogue your assets, but also let you correlate them with other data, including brand, equipment model, serial number, location, supplier, technician responsibility, manuals, and dates of past interventions.
The use of real-time monitoring of maintenance plans by maintenance management platforms simplifies the creation of preventative maintenance plans for various equipment types.
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