Do you know how to develop a preventive maintenance plan for industrial machinery? And why is it necessary?
In this post, we’ll focus exclusively on preventive maintenance. Since there are different types of maintenance, we’ll address these questions so you can understand the benefits it brings to businesses.
What is preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance ensures that machinery remains in optimal condition through periodic inspections of equipment and maintenance tasks.
These services can be scheduled according to a pre-established program based on the average operating hours of the equipment in question.
This process generally involves inspection, cleaning, and replacing parts as needed.
Types of Preventive Maintenance:
Time-Based Preventive Maintenance
This example is based on periodic inspections of a critical piece of equipment that would seriously impact production in the event of a failure.
Usage-Based Preventive Maintenance
The prolonged use of a part over the course of hours or production cycles.
Why is preventive maintenance necessary?
A preventive maintenance plan is implemented to schedule tasks such as cleaning, lubrication, oil changes, adjustments, repairs, inspections, and replacement of parts, as well as partial or complete overhauls that are scheduled on a regular basis.
This involves keeping accurate records of each inspection and service; it is also necessary to know the service life of each part in order to determine how often it should be replaced.
The records serve as a reference for maintenance technicians, allowing them to anticipate when parts need to be replaced. They also help diagnose malfunctions when they occur.
Preventive maintenance software is very practical and useful for collecting and organizing this information.
How should preventive maintenance be performed?
This proactive approach involves four key elements that we strive to take into account: inspection, detection, correction, and prevention.
Inspection:
This component is essential for preventive maintenance, helping companies in two different ways:
First, inspections confirm that the machines are safe to use.
Regular inspections help prevent workplace injuries and provide companies with greater protection against potential civil liability.
In addition, regular inspections protect the equipment, ensuring that the product functions as intended by the manufacturer and our company.
Detection:
Adopting a “run-to-failure” approach can result in additional costs for the company—in this case, for our customers.
Preventive maintenance helps us detect problems early on, when it is still relatively easy and inexpensive to fix them.
Correction:
Fixing a problem that has been properly identified minimizes repair time, saving companies money.
If this were to happen, our technicians would take steps to quickly address the problem before it worsens or brings operations to a halt.
Prevention:
Maintenance technicians adjust combinations of inspection records and record maintenance times to learn from past mistakes, thereby preventing future equipment problems.
When equipment operates as inspected, technical staff can focus on proactive (rather than reactive) maintenance tasks.
What are the benefits of preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance offers companies a number of important benefits, including:
- Extending the useful life of the company’s equipment.
- Reduction in unplanned downtime caused by equipment failures.
- Less maintenance and fewer unnecessary inspections.
- Significant reduction in errors in daily operations
