Preventative Maintenance Inspection (PMI) | Your Way to Enhance Operational Efficacy

Preventive maintenance inspection solely focuses on “Inspection” as part of the preventive maintenance program. Facility managers carry out rigorous inspections to analyze the condition of your organization’s critical assets. The data collected from these inspections is used to guide the necessary preventive maintenance work. However, an organization can make Preventive Maintenance Inspections successful only if they are well prepared with a holistic and strategic preventive maintenance inspection workflow. To ensure uninterrupted, undelayed, and facilitated maintenance inspections, adhere to these expert guidelines:

• • An inspection toolkit equipped with all the essential tools, including an industrial stethoscope, torch, infrared thermometer, mirrors, stroboscope, and vibration pen, should be readily available for timely inspections.
  • The condition-monitoring routes must cover all necessary inspections.
  • The guards and other protective equipment should be removable to inspect belts, couplings, and chains.
  • The oil containers, base bolts, and gauges must be clean and spill-free to streamline the inspection process.
  • The maintenance inspectors and technicians must be well-trained.

3 Stellar Tips For Successful Preventive Maintenance Inspections

While the SOPs stated above lay the foundation for a successful inspection, they are insufficient to achieve optimum operational maintenance. Implement these three tips within your strategy to gain maximum value from PMI efforts:

• Integrate a CMMS or EAM Solution for Preventive Maintenance Tasks

Deploying a CMMS or EAM solution is crucial for streamlining the path to achieving your maintenance goals. It simplifies, automates, organizes, and optimizes your organization’s preventive maintenance program, leading to optimal maintenance efficacy. As many as 58% of facilities rely on CMMS to manage, control, and evaluate their inspection and maintenance operations. By employing the CMMS appropriately, facility managers can automate the process of collecting valuable inspection data and translating it into meaningful reports. This makes generating analytics on emerging breakdowns and equipment much more effortless. Facility managers can also benefit from automated maintenance work order systems with minimum human errors. Consequently, the PMI planning, scheduling, and execution stage become much more straightforward and manageable. Simply put, the benefits of CMMS software are intriguing. However, up to 80% of CMMS implementations fail due to these detrimental mistakes:

• Not considering users as part of the selection process.
• Implementing complex CMMS software.
• Hesitation to adopt modern technology.

To avoid these challenges, your organization must steer clear of the inadequate and unstrategic implementation of CMMS. Pro Tip: Implement a modern, easy-to-use, and adaptable EAM system like The NonStop Suite to streamline preventive maintenance inspections and foster your PM program.

• Create Preventive Maintenance Checklists

For successful PMIs, your organization must establish inspection checklists aligned with the facility’s maintenance objectives. Creating checklists partially induces standardization in the inspection process. Equipment details, inspection and maintenance schedules, SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), and all other critical  maintenance-related information is organized in a systematic order. Due to this process standardization, maintenance technicians become more efficient, saving your organization labor cost and time. A recommended approach toward this documentation is to facilitate the process with an automated solution. Take the NonStop Suite’s dynamic e-forms, for instance. Using this advanced tool, your company’s facility managers can digitize the inspection checklists and other paperwork. Consequently, the inspection data becomes easy to record, maintain, access, share, and track throughout the preventive maintenance plan, resulting in higher-quality data. Pro Tip: The NonStop Suite offers an automated, modern, and simplified solution for all your documentation needs. Bid farewell to the outdated, crumpled, coffee-stained, lost, or not turned-in paper forms and create PMI checklists via dynamic e-forms!

• Bridge The Gap Between PMI & Corrective Maintenance With Automation

Asset-intensive companies often fail to dictate corrective maintenance tasks when they operate on a manual inspection and maintenance system. This lack of follow-through increases the risk related to worker safety and enforcement action. To cope with this challenge, your company would want to complete the necessary corrective actions on time, followed through to closure. One way to ensure that is to automate the communication pillar between facility inspectors and corrective maintenance teams with inspection software. Consequently, your facility inspectors can trigger the required preventive maintenance activities automatically. The concerned maintenance technicians are also timely notified about the required tasks along with the relevant details in a unified system. Since the PMI process is shifted to an advanced, and accessible system, the facility manager can supervise the whole process, ensuring accountability for the maintenance team. Pro Tip: Implement a modern, reliable, advanced inspection software like The NonStop Suite to support your company’s asset defect management process and to increase asset life cycles.