Preventive maintenance. Important elements for its success

Preventive maintenance (PM) sums up the activities that are regularly performed on an equipment to reduce the likelihood of failure during operation. Basically we want the equipment to work perfectly until the next planned shutdown.

Implementing preventive maintenance involves a few steps, namely:

1. Choice of equipment maintenance system

2. Preparation of spare parts lists

3. Supply of spare parts

4. Training of maintenance personnel for the performance of preventive maintenance activity.

5. Preparation of work plans (JP) and establishment of execution frequencies.

6. Launching Preventive and Corrective Work Orders (WOs)

Things seem simple at first glance, don't they? Yes, they are simple if it is a few dozen pieces of equipment that we want to include in the preventive maintenance program.

Implementation steps 1 to 4 take some time to complete, but their path is clear and does not raise difficulties in implementation.

The problems appear in steps 5 and 6 because the preparation of work plans, if we want to be in line with the reality on the ground, requires experienced staff to know how the equipment works. More precisely, work plans will never be nailed down if we want to be effective (maximum gain with minimum resources consumed), due to the fact that nowadays the loading of equipment changes quite often and we always gain experience on their performance.

Things change even more in step 6 when we have hundreds of pieces of equipment included in the preventive maintenance system. Why? Because we want the average weekly workload to be about the same throughout the year. This means that the start of the starting point for the preventive maintenance of each equipment must take into account several variables: the location of the equipment (routes as short as possible from one equipment to another), the type of WO (weekly, monthly, quarterly ... , mechanical, electrical ...), available resources (by categories of trades), availability of equipment for preventive maintenance, etc.

Even with the purchase of a program on the market, I will only succeed in optimizing maintenance processes if I improve the existing sequencing.

Have you started optimizing preventive maintenance?