Are you looking for a Preventive Maintenance Solution?

This article will give you a better idea about preventive maintenance, its effectiveness, and you will also know a better alternative to this.

So read ahead to know about all mentioned above.

What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive Maintenance, as known as Preventative Maintenance is a type of maintenance strategy where repair activities are carried out on machines to prevent it from their complete breakdown.

So, it’s performed prior to full machine failure, unlike reactive maintenance. 

Preventive Maintenance can be also viewed as an intermediate maintenance strategy in terms of complexity between reactive maintenance and predictive maintenance.

What are the types of Preventive maintenance?

Preventive Maintenance is carried out in two ways namely, time-based and run-hour or usage-based.

Run-hour Preventive Maintenance

In the Run-hour type of Preventive Maintenance, the maintenance plans are created after certain hours, or kilo-meters, or production cycles of a rotating machine.

Eg. Car servicing done every 5000 miles completed. You will not wait until your car or bike fails while on a journey, of-course.

Periodic Preventive Maintenance

In the Periodic type of preventive maintenance, the maintenance plans are created after certain fixed time intervals.

Eg. A common example can be servicing a heater device every year before winter.

When is the Preventive Maintenance strategy required?

FOR CRITICAL ROTATING ASSETS

You need to adopt the preventive maintenance strategy for machines that fulfill the following criteria:

• The machine is critical
• The machine failures can be avoided by regular maintenance
• The machine has a higher chance of failure with continuous operation

When is Preventive Maintenance Strategy NOT required?

FOR SMALL ROTATING ASSETS

You don’t need to perform the scheduled-based repairs on machines that are not critical i.e. which doesn’t affect the production process directly. Eg. small motors, small pumps, etc.

You would be saving more with reactive or breakdown maintenance applied to them, as each time a maintenance work will just increase your overall maintenance expenditure. 

How can you create an effective Preventative Maintenance Plan?

You can easily create a Manual Preventive Maintenance plan by following this simple 4 Steps procedure.

1. Choose your critical machines where you first want to implement the PM plan.
2. Collect all important information about your machinery from its OEM datasheet.
3. Also, collect the information from the earlier maintenance logs created by the technicians.
4. Finally, create your Preventive Maintenance Checklist which may also look like the one created below.

What are the advantages of the Preventive Maintenance Method?

Preventive Maintenance meaning is that it will always be planned as compared to Reactive Maintenance.

Advantages over the Reactive Maintenance

1. You can save many overhead costs that come along with reactive maintenance. This includes the high cost of spare parts in case of emergency due to spare part cost plus high shipping charges.

2. And also the high maintenance costs due to prolonged repair work needed because of lack of planning.

As per studies, the cost of reactive maintenance is $21 per hour and the cost of preventive maintenance is $16 per hour.

3. The production loss will also be less due to shorter repair time. 

4. And your technicians will be safer while doing their work due to the pre-planned nature of preventive maintenance as compared to reactive maintenance. 

This further gives a further edge to the Preventive maintenance over the reactive type of maintenance.

Advantages over the Predictive Maintenance and Condition-Based Maintenance

You don’t need any initial investment cost of set up like in Predictive maintenance or condition monitoring devices/equipment required in Condition-based maintenance.

What are the disadvantages of using the Preventive Maintenance strategy?

Disadvantages over the Reactive Maintenance

As preventive maintenance is planned, you need to spend some amount as well as time on the planning and strategy of repair work whenever it is required to be carried out. 

Disadvantages over the Predictive Maintenance or Condition-Based Maintenance 

In preventive maintenance, it costs you each time when you are carrying out the repair work. So, this adds the maintenance costs over time, unlike the condition-based and predictive maintenance where you can schedule the repair based on the condition of your asset.

In fact, the maintenance cost for preventive maintenance is $16 per hour while it’s $10 per hour for predictive maintenance.

Final Wordings on Preventive Maintenance

Maintenance Costs (/hp/year)

So, this was all about preventive maintenance, its advantages, and its disadvantages.

Preventive maintenance is indeed a great strategy to implement for reducing unplanned breakdowns of your critical machines. It saves those productive time that gets wasted in reactive maintenance and also ensures much safety.

Still, over a period of time, this maintenance becomes less effective. And a better way to ensure more productivity is to adopt a strategy like Predictive Maintenance, which is an IoT based advanced maintenance strategy.

If you are looking for a PdM Platform for your machines, then we at SenseGrow offer :

ioEYE Predict: The Vibration Monitoring IoT Platform.

Our ioEYE Sensor also monitors parameters like Ultrasound, Temperature, Magnetic Flux apart from the Machine Vibrations.

The platform will show you the health condition of your rotating machines on our SaaS cloud platform ioEYE Predict, which will help you to plan your maintenance tasks.