Preventive maintenance in the automotive industry

Maintenance is one of the most important support activities in an organization.

Over time, with the increasing complexity of equipment, several types of maintenance activities have emerged. Their role is to ensure the operation of the equipment is done at the parameters at which they were designed but also to reduce maintenance costs. Properly planned maintenance involves determining the type of maintenance to be applied to each piece of equipment. In this regard, the importance of the equipment, its complexity and its duration of use will have to be taken into account.

The most common type of maintenance that applies to equipment is preventive maintenance. It is cheaper to prevent than to repair. Another advantage of preventive maintenance is that it can be performed by low to medium skilled personnel and many of the activities can be performed even by production operators using that equipment.

It is a good idea to use software applications designed specifically for this activity to track preventive maintenance. Dozens of such applications can be found on the market, any of them following the same principles of preventive maintenance. The difference is in the graphics, in how the information is accessed, and the number of devices that each application can handle.

Planned preventive maintenance activities include operations such as cleaning, lubrication, checking and other minor operations such as the replacement of parts.

The automotive industry is one of the industries where the successful application of preventive maintenance brings significant savings for these organizations.

Among the benefits we can mention the increase of the availability of the equipment, the delivery of products to the cadence and the quality demanded by the customers and the reduction of the maintenance costs.

Implementing preventive maintenance is not a simple process and often gives us a lot of trouble. Several factors need to be considered and analyzed, such as: the equipment to be included in this activity, setting spare parts, training the staff, making work plans and identifying their launch frequency, establishing the most efficient routes for work orders, analysing feedback from the operators who carry out the work orders, the optimization of the work plans by the maintenance engineers and the preparation of reports highlighting the equipment problems. Each of the above steps needs to be done very carefully in order to reap the benefits of preventive maintenance and many of them are living documents that need to be updated regularly.

You can rely on preventive maintenance, applying it correctly will bring about positive results. You will see that there will be no more serious defects, the number of faults will be reduced, the staff will be more satisfied with the equipment and the orders will be delivered on time.