Preventive Maintenance (PM) Strategies

As maintenance management often accounts for as much as 40% of operational budgets, the savings made possible from increased efficiency and reduction of waste can be staggering. Corrective maintenance is a costly activity because by its very nature, it allows failure to occur before rectifying the problem. There are a number of different maintenance strategies such as operate-to-failure or replace-before-failure, either of which incorporates elements of preventive and predictive maintenance to greater or lesser degrees. Whatever the organisation concurs is appropriate for the equipment maintenance program - its goals and procedures - should be formally documented, and it should not be open to arbitrary changes or interpretations.

Trading paper-based methods or spreadsheets for an automated computerised system is empowering for Maintenance, Production and Engineering Managers alike; quite simply, a CMMS is an essential tool which gives you the freedom to move maintenance operations from reactive crisis management towards an effectively planned and controlled system.

Preventive (sometimes known as ‘Preventative’) maintenance management is the traditional practice of proactive, coherent, and formal failure management programme. The planned repair, component replacement, and servicing activities are scheduled to detect and correct incipient failures either before they occur or before they develop into major defects. Plant shutdowns, technical change-over and operations maintenance processes and procedures are planned down to a very fine level of detail in order to minimise waste at every opportunity.
PM activities can include partial or complete overhauls at specified periods, oil changes, and lubrication rounds etc, and can form part of a Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) programme.

RCM strategies tend to emphasise the use of predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques combined with traditional preventive measures.