Simply put, preventive maintenance is a set of activities that focuses on reducing the likelihood of equipment failure. It ensures that every component of your industrial assets receive proper maintenance. Costly disruptions and unexpected breakdowns are a couple of obvious consequences of having a poor preventive maintenance strategy or no strategy at all. This blog post will highlight some of the steps necessary to create an effective preventive maintenance plan for your facility.
Preventive maintenance is usually performed during regular operations in order to avoid the heavy costs of shutdowns or downtime. Your company can focus on preventive maintenance to achieve equipment reliability and operational efficiency. Here is what you need to do:
Start with planning
Before you go ahead and chalk out maintenance processes, it’s important to first set your goals and create a plan to achieve them. First, evaluate your equipment and determine the need for weekly, monthly, or yearly maintenance checks. Also, build a reliable team of maintenance personnel which might include technicians, electrical engineers, shutdown experts, and managers. Irrespective of the size of your company, initial planning will be beneficial down the road when things become complicated.
Inventory management
The most lengthy step of developing a preventive maintenance program is creating and managing the inventory of important equipment. While it’s time-consuming to create inventory, it’s critical to have the equipment ready so that preventive checks can be made on time. Taking note of asset identification, serial numbers, specifications, and equipment models are some of the important steps. You should also evaluate and document the current condition of your critical equipment so that you can prioritize what’s important and what’s not.
Develop procedures
Once the equipment is documented, the next stage is to create schedules and procedures. How frequently a machine should be lubricated or jobs required to accomplish maintenance-related work are some of the important considerations when developing PM procedures. It might be suitable for you to schedule maintenance during run-time hours.
No matter the preferences, consider all the scheduling scenarios and time required to accomplish preventive maintenance tasks. Documented industry standards and manufacturer recommendations will help set effective maintenance procedures and frequencies. Precisely speaking, make sure your preventive maintenance program includes operating procedures, estimated time, and resources required to complete the job.
It does not require a huge investment or expensive tools to implement a maintenance plan. All you need is manufacturer recommendations, a well-thought-out plan, basic tools, and a maintenance team willing to adapt and learn. If you don’t have the necessary resources to create or implement a good preventive maintenance plan, talk to a reputable company that provides preventive maintenance services.
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