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Consider the scenario whereby your critical equipment gets out of order in the middle of peak production and immediately goes offline and uses up your budget on emergency repairs. This reactive run-to-failing strategy causes your team to work hard to put out fires as the revenue runs out every minute of the outage.
Preventive Maintenance (PM) is an alternative strategy, whose aim is to prevent mechanical breakdowns before they can ever interfere with your workflow. A switch to the proactive mentality will result in the facility managers being able to maintain asset reliability and prevent the ordeal of the unexpected outages.
This guide will discuss the key nature of preventive maintenance and why the adoption of a sound strategy is beneficial. You will find out how to create a data-driven strategy that will cut costs in an unprecedented way and protect your assets from a long-term perspective.
Basically, Preventive Maintenance (PM) comprises routine maintenance activities carried out on equipment and assets to avoid some unexpected breakdowns and to increase their service life.
Preventive maintenance is proactive unlike reactive maintenance which only resolves problems after the machines are found to have broken down. It entails scheduled checkups and maintenance of equipment to maintain them in the best working conditions, effectively preventing small problems before they escalate to bigger and expensive problems.
The main aim of PM is to keep things as easy as possible: reduce the downtime, enhance safety, and eliminate the costliness of emergency repairs. Common PM activities are although certain ones are industry-specific, the following activities are likely to be performed:
Preventive maintenance is not necessarily logical. The common classification of the strategies is based on the mechanism of their triggering, i.e. calendar, usage, or real-time.
The most common approaches initiated by most organizations include:
To organizations that seek to take it a step further, data becomes the force:
PM is also defined by the specific work performed:
A shift in the operational approach to the reactive mode of firefighting to proactive PM strategy presents significant gains in both monetary, operational, and safety indicators.
Studies have shown that preventive maintenance may be 20 percent cheaper than corrective maintenance per year. Emergency labor, hasty shipment of part, and loss of production usually triple or quadruple the cost of reactive repair. Moreover, some other companies investing in PM have up to 150 percent ROI because of prolonged equipment and minimized energy expenses.
Failure Unplanned failure stops production and idle employees. The PM strategy can decrease the downtimes average by half. You enable the technicians to work efficiently by arranging maintenance during off-hours and reducing the number of interruptions since technicians do not have to compete to find a solution during an emergency.
Unattended machinery goes out quickly. Proactively maintained assets may last 20 to 30 years longer than reactively maintain assets. Systemic failures are avoided by routine service, which includes changing filters and belts and postponing costly capital replacement expenses.
Some of the hazards that are checked on periodically without causing accidents include frayed wiring or guarding issues. In the example of industries that are highly controlled and regulated (e.g. pharmaceuticals or food processing) a PM program offers a verifiable audit trail proving that safety and hygiene practices are followed.
Preventive maintenance in different sectors appears to be different. The following is the application of these principles by different industries:
The creation of an efficient PM program does not occur in one day. These steps will help transition to a lean approach instead of a fix-it-breaks strategy.
Implementing a preventive maintenance strategy is powerful but pairing it with Cryotos CMMS makes it effortless. Cryotos takes the complexity out of planning and executes your strategy with precision.
Cryotos will easily enable you to create intricate recurring schedules. Either you want a daily check, or you would like to have a service based on the amount of usage and meter reading, Cryotos will automatically generate the work order and allocate the correct technician to the correct job and time.
Your technicians are not confined to a desk, and so should not be their software. With Cryotos mobile application, they have checklists, manuals and asset history in their pockets that enable them to update status, take pictures of problem and close work orders right at the shop floor.
Make sure that there is consistency with required step-by-step checklists. Cryotos also makes sure that all technicians are of the same quality when it comes to completing the PM task, and this lowers the incidence of human error.
As technicians use parts for PM tasks, Cryotos automatically deducts them from your inventory records and can even trigger low-stock alerts, ensuring you are never caught empty-handed.
Preventive maintenance is a strategic investment that shifts operations from reactive chaos to proactive reliability. By leveraging data and automation, you protect your assets and secure long-term profitability while ensuring safety and compliance.
Ready to stop paying for downtime? Explore how Cryotos CMMS automates your preventive maintenance schedules to extend asset life and boost efficiency.
