The Benefits of Preventive Maintenance – Part 2

Picking up from our last blog, we’re back with another spotlight on Preventive Maintenance and the advantages of this widely-valued maintenance strategy.

THE TYPES OF PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE

• Usage-Based Preventive Maintenance: This involves taking into account an asset’s average daily usage or exposure to environmental conditions, and using this to forecast a due date for future inspections or maintenance tasks.
  
  
• Time-Based Preventive Maintenance: Maintenance that takes place at a scheduled time, based on a specific calendar interval and when necessary work orders have been created.
  
  
• Prescriptive Maintenance: This type of maintenance highlights why mechanical failure will transpire, by analysing and determining different options and potential outcomes in order to mitigate risks to the operation. 
  
  
• Predictive Maintenance: A form of maintenance that is designed to schedule corrective maintenance actions before a failure occurs. It involves the organisation’s maintenance team determining the current condition of the equipment, in order to estimate when maintenance should be performed. Maintenance tasks are then scheduled to prevent unexpected equipment failures.
  
  

PREVENTIVE VERSUS PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE

Preventive and Predictive Maintenance are significantly superior to “Reactive Maintenance”, which involves repairing or replacing a piece of machinery only after it breaks down. 

Reactive Maintenance is, in other words, leaving the maintenance of machinery and equipment until the crisis of a mechanical-breakdown eventually transpires – not ideal!

Preventive and Predictive Maintenance are both positive, proactive approaches to routine maintenance strategies.  

Here’s how Preventive Maintenance differs from Predictive Maintenance:

1. Preventive Maintenance takes place on the same schedule every cycle — whether or not the maintenance is actually required. Preventive Maintenance is designed to keep mechanical parts in good repair.
   
   
2. Predictive maintenance, on the other hand, occurs as needed by drawing on real-time collection and analysis of machine operation data to identify issues at the nascent stage before production is negatively interrupted by these issues.
   
   

In a Predictive Maintenance schedule, repairs take place during machine operation in an attempt to address an actual problem. If a shutdown is required, the overall maintenance will consequently be a quicker and more targeted experience.

WHAT ARE ADDITIONAL BENEFITS OF PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE? 

• Fewer errors in day-to-day operations
  
  When an organisation practises preventive maintenance, its machines and equipment are vastly more reliable and effective, thereby enhancing the day-to-day efficiency of the company. And that’s money in the bank, if you ask us!
  
  Beyond the enhanced efficiency that this strategy offers, it assists in also improving the quality of the organisation’s output.
  
  Organisations that aren’t open to implementing Preventive Maintenance, but choose to operate their maintenance activities on the basis of a reactive approach to maintenance, inevitably end up with frequent breakdowns and greater variability in quality.
  
  These two factors alone lead to decreased standardisation and consistency in production, as well as increased product damage, all of which convey substandard quality.
  
  
• Improved reliability of equipment
  
  In essence, if IT equipment maintenance suffers, so will the reliability of the asset. And the reliability of equipment is vital in ensuring that an organisation’s projects are completed on time and without exceeding the budget.
  
  A strong Preventive Maintenance routine allows you to detect potential signs of equipment failure early on and to deal with it before it escalates into a catastrophe.
  
  Another important benefit of ensuring the reliability of equipment through frequent maintenance includes the positive effect it has on reducing injuries and fatalities in the workplace, which leads us to our final advantage of Preventive Maintenance…
  
  
• Reduced risk of injury
  
  We’ve highlighted a few impressive advantages of relying on an ongoing Preventive Maintenance strategy. The benefit that it offers to occupational health and safety, though, absolutely seals the deal on why every company should implement a strong and serious approach to Preventive Maintenance.
  
  There is an obvious connection between the degree of Preventive Maintenance an organisation implements and the organisation’s safety incident rates – the more Preventive Maintenance performed, the lower the incident rates!
  
  
• Preventive Maintenance offers immense safety benefits in terms of:
  
  
  • Detecting faulty equipment before an organisation’s employee/s are at risk of being harmed by it.
    
    
  • Preventing hazardous situations by reducing the likelihood of equipment failures while in operation, and Reducing the safety risks that may result from unplanned downtime (for example, in order to do work on a malfunctioning asset a maintenance team would need to shut it down entirely, and unfortunately, there is the risk of this not being done properly). 

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about Preventive Maintenance as much as we’ve enjoyed sharing this information with you! 

If you’d like to know about how we can help you in implementing a Preventive Maintenance strategy in your organisation’s IT department, we invite you to contact us to speak to one of our leading IT Maintenance Specialists!