If your organization is running on a run-to-failure approach, you may notice increased maintenance costs in your financial reports. Downtime, workers’ overtime, lost production, outsourced expertise, quality issues, and costly corrective repairs can all add up to disproportionate expenses!
Studies indicate that a well planned preventative maintenance (PM) program can save your organization as much as 18% or more, over other reactive maintenance approaches. However, establishing and executing a successful preventive maintenance program isn’t that easy, and that’s where this guide comes into action!
Stick till the end as we explain the 6 foundational steps to creating a sustainable, functional, and effective preventative maintenance program. That way your organization can achieve its maintenance goals and set higher benchmarks. Let’s hop in!
What is a Preventative or Preventive Maintenance Program?
A preventive maintenance program is a series of regularly scheduled inspections and preventive maintenance tasks performed on assets in working condition to keep them up and running. Tasks like checking fluid, replacing the air filters, and changing oil are some of the Preventive maintenance examples. The primary goal of this proactive maintenance is to prevent minor issues from turning into major costly breakdowns. Hence, subsiding the risk of unplanned downtimes or breakdown maintenance and inspections.
The facility maintenance managers act in accordance with the devised preventive maintenance program to pinpoint potential non conformances and resolve them promptly. Consequently, the assets are always in their peak operating condition, with minimal unexpected operational shutdowns, backlogs, miscommunication, accidents, and associated corrective maintenance costs.
The 4 Key Elements of Preventive Maintenance Workflow
A meticulously planned preventive maintenance program streamlines the path to reliability for asset-intensive companies. However, preventive maintenance success relies on facility managers implementing a holistic and well thought-out preventive maintenance workflow. This workflow is carefully divided into the following four essential action items. Let’s discuss these concepts at their core to understand how integral they are to a successful preventive maintenance program:
1. Inspection
Inspection is the foremost step in a preventive maintenance program. Depending on the asset, facility managers must carry out thorough inspections at time, or meter-based, intervals. These inspections unlock benefits like increased liability protection, property protection, and equipment reliability for your organization. Moreover, regular facility inspections ensure that the equipment is safe for technicians to operate, minimizing the risk of workplace injuries.
2. Detection
Facilities operating on a reactive maintenance approach end up with hefty repair expenses, excessive equipment depreciation, and unplanned downtime. Early inspections detect the problems (or potential problems) when they are minor, thus, relatively easier to tackle. This detection is critical to ensure enhanced asset productivity and effectiveness. Hence, the equipment continues running without breaking down.
3. Correction
Once identified, it’s time to countermeasure the errors before they worsen. Taking a proactive approach towards equipment care, facility managers schedule inspections and maintenance for the asset to correct the problems. This maintenance is performed outside the asset’s standard operating time to keep the operations uninterrupted.
4. Prevention
The last action item in a preventive maintenance workflow is to combine the collected inspection and maintenance data for increased maintenance efficiency. Facility managers evaluate past maintenance notes to extract the learning points. This preventive measure helps organizations fill the gaps and improvise future maintenance plans.
When To Use Preventative Maintenance Programs?
A preventive maintenance program can help your organization optimize a maintenance schedule to minimize the risk of unexpected asset failures. However, when exactly should your company create preventive maintenance schedules? Well, the answer depends on the equipment involved.
Facility managers should assess the equipment to decide when to use preventive maintenance. Gauging from the equipment analysis, the facility managers can quickly develop an ideal PM inspection and maintenance frequency. Typically, a facility manager would conduct a preventive maintenance program in these conditions:
- The equipment is critical to the success of routine operations.
- The equipment is typically at a high risk of failure; it fails in consistent ways or at specific intervals of time.
The equipment has aged or been over-used, and for this reason, it holds a high but preventable risk of failure.
6 Steps To Designing a Winning Preventative Maintenance Program!
A strategic plan is the cornerstone of every effective preventive maintenance plan. Planned and executed correctly, preventive maintenance programs support the facilities maintenance management strategy by actively extending asset lifespans and reliability. Enlisted below are the six key steps that every preventive maintenance plan should include at its foundation:
1. Outline The PM Goals & Objectives
The foremost step in any winning preventive maintenance program is to lay out your organization’s PM goals and align them with the company-wide goals. Generally, scheduling preventive maintenance programs serve two overarching purposes: enhancing asset longevity and ensuring workplace safety. However, every facility draws unique preventive maintenance plans that vary based on unique needs, assets, and goals. To identify your maintenance objectives, think at the core of your facility maintenance strategy. Look for the main reasons that call for the maintenance team’s attention. It could be reducing downtime, cutting corrective maintenance costs, or enhancing asset reliability. Establish clear goals and objectives to get the foundational idea of the budget, headcount, and more for supporting your preventive maintenance plan.
2. Collect Critical Maintenance Data
To develop a preventive maintenance program that emphasizes the ROI, facility managers need to gather all the essential data. Extrapolating the maintenance data becomes more manageable with a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) or EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) solution. Alternatively, your facility manager may want to check out the available statistical data from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and the maintenance logs and reports. This will enable you to determine which assets require preventive maintenance as well as the frequency of these tasks.
Pro Tip: Streamline data processing and inspections with The NonStop Suite featuring dynamic e-forms, smart NFC asset tags, and cloud-based EAM.
3. Prioritize Critical Assets for PM Schedule
Putting every asset on the initial preventive maintenance programs could be a detrimental mistake. Based on their criticality and potential to disrupt operations, certain assets should be prioritized over others. Therefore, facility managers must determine which assets hold which priority in the preventive maintenance workflow.
To set up a realistic asset hierarchy for your preventive maintenance plan, take the asset inventory and ask these questions for every machine and component:
- How critical is the asset to routine operations?
- How would the asset’s failure impact the production process, workers’ safety, organizational productivity and environment?
- How reliable is the asset? How frequently does it fail, and does it break down in consistent ways?
- How preventable are the asset non conformances? Are the issues detectable, and what’s the probability of spotting these issues quickly?
Answering these questions will enable your organization to prioritize the critical assets that greatly halt production, carry high maintenance costs, or hold safety risks. Consequently, facility managers can run the initial preventive maintenance program while ensuring improved planning and resource utilization.
4. Establish Key Metrics and KPIs
Once the facility managers are settled on the preventive maintenance goals, it’s time to set concrete targets to define success. Various preventive maintenance metrics and KPIs evaluate the structured initiatives’ success. However, most asset-intensive companies use the following five metrics to measure the effectiveness of their preventive maintenance program:
- Preventive Maintenance Compliance (PMC): This metric studies how many scheduled preventive maintenance tasks were successfully executed within a defined period.
- Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percentage (SMCP): This KPI looks at the severity of delayed maintenance activities.
- Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP): This performance indicator helps organizations compare the time invested in planned maintenance vs. time spent on unplanned maintenance in a specific timeframe.
- Mean Time To Repair (MTTR): Companies use MTTR to determine the average time it takes the maintenance technicians to restore an asset.
- Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE): This is a gold standard that, as a result of maintenance efforts, measures how effective a piece of equipment is, how well it performs, and what quality it produces.
Pro Tip: Utilize a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) or EAM solution like NonStop Suite to calculate and monitor the fundamental preventive maintenance metrics, KPIs, and relative numbers in a unified and mobilized system with ease.
5. Create Preventative Maintenance Checklists
Facility managers need to monitor each step in the preventive maintenance process closely. To facilitate this part of your preventive maintenance program, inspection and maintenance checklists help significantly. For every asset, all the crucial maintenance tasks, their scheduled date, set of instructions, and related information is structurally organized. This initiative helps the maintenance team to execute their respective jobs efficiently.
Additionally, facility managers can include the related KPIs and metrics to monitor success numbers consistently. These stats aid a company in determining the effectiveness of the preventive maintenance initiatives on maintenance operations. To simplify this step, even more, a CMMS solution or a preventive maintenance software can help your organization shift the facility maintenance checklists and paperwork to an automated database. Since the data is readily available, accessible, and shareable, the overall efficiency of the preventive maintenance plan improves significantly.
Pro Tip: Ditch the outdated paperwork with The NonStop Suite’s dynamic e-forms! Create preventive maintenance inspection and maintenance checklists on a system that is modern, automated, and accessible anytime and anywhere for your company!
6. Track & Fine-tune Your Preventive Maintenance Plan
Preventive maintenance plans require constant monitoring and evaluation. The facility manager must revisit the preventive maintenance program to track the progress, fill in the gaps and fortify the functional preventive maintenance strategies. They must study the gathered data to gauge the maintenance operations’ efficiency and alter the maintenance strategies as needed.
Suppose a production unit gets routine maintenance but still keeps breaking down. In this case, the facility manager would look into the maintenance data to pinpoint the root cause and increase the inspection and preventive maintenance frequencies accordingly.
Pro Tip: When monitoring your preventive maintenance plan, an EAM-based solution like The NonStop Suite can make a significant difference. All the maintenance data, work order notes, and reports are available in a mobilized system. Hence, your organization can easily spot the strengths and weaknesses of your preventive maintenance programs and uncover the opportunities to improvise further.
Conclusion: Streamline Your Preventative Maintenance Program With NSS
An effective preventive maintenance benefits your asset-intensive company in numerous ways. However, creating a winning one entails a great deal of work, effort, time, money, and other resources. To foster a preventive maintenance program for your company and ultimately move to predictive maintenance, join forces with the NonStop Suite!
The NonStop Suite is a combination of digital solutions to streamline facility maintenance management at your organization. Take the dynamic e-forms, for instance; Now you can bid farewell to those piles of paperwork and shift to the digital world with all your paperwork! Create an inspection and maintenance checklist to support your preventive maintenance plan on sophisticated e-forms. While your company’s maintenance data sits securely in an EAM-based cloud, you can unlock perks like easy data recording, tracking, accessing, and sharing for all your maintenance team.
Another worth-mentioning feature of The NonStop Suite is the NFC asset tagging system. These are scannable codes that can be placed on equipment and assets within your facility. The maintenance technicians can scan these codes with a mobile device to gain instant access to the asset’s preventive maintenance history and future maintenance tasks. Simply put, with NSS by your side, you can mobilize and future-proof your facilities and workforce like never before!
Shall you want to amplify your preventive maintenance program with these smart features, consult with The NonStop Group today!
