Efficient maintenance is built on a preventive maintenance program, and its effectiveness is strongly correlated with the usage of a CMMS solution.
Why implement a preventive maintenance plan?
Maintenance managers ‘ main motivations when they implement a preventive maintenance plan are preventing asset failures before they occur and extending asset life.
Definition of preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance must be “carried out according to predetermined time intervals or after a defined number of runtime units, without prior evaluation of the asset’s condition.”
There are three different types of preventive maintenance:
- Time-based (or systematic/scheduled) preventive maintenance, which primarily consists in the reviewing of assets at a defined date, after a pre-determined period
- Condition-based preventive maintenance, which is deployed when relevant indicators (such as reduced yields) show risks of asset failure or deterioration.
- Predictive maintenance, which relies on IoT sensors capable of analyzing key factors. An alert is sent when the artificial intelligence detects a variation.
Finding the optimal level of preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance has its pros and cons, and one should always keep in mind that the purpose of establishing a preventive program is above all financial, namely, to improve maintenance management to control costs.
As a maintenance manager, you know that performing corrective actions comes with a cost calculated by adding the costs directly generated by maintenance (for spare parts, labor, etc.) and downtime costs.
When you implement a preventive maintenance plan, the workload and costs of corrective maintenance will decrease. The trap, now, is to not fall into over-maintenance, which would again increase costs.
In other words, you need to find the optimal ratio for your preventive maintenance.
What are the expected benefits of preventive maintenance?
The implementation of preventive maintenance, compared to corrective maintenance, has many advantages:
- asset reliability increases
- asset availability is improved
- the maintenance team has better knowledge of the assets
- the stress generated during corrective/reactive works decreases for the maintenance department
- machinery failures are foreseen and planned for
- maintenance costs are reduced
Generally speaking, the efficiency of your asset maintenance is increased.
Tracking your preventive maintenance plan with CMMS
CMMS is the ideal maintenance management tool to generate, define, plan and launch preventive maintenance actions.
Concretely, however, how should you design a preventive program?
Create your preventive program in 4 steps
- It is imperative first to analyze and identify the criticality of your assets.
- Once this first step is completed, a solid maintenance plan can be constructed following these three steps:
- DEFINE asset requirements
Each asset warrants a specific follow-up, and the requirement will be defined according to:
- the experience of the maintenance engineers,
- manufacturers’ recommendations,
- regulatory guidelines for compliance.
- CREATE preventive maintenance documentation
Transparent instruction sheets make the work
protocol safe and optimized, thanks to:
- step-by-step instructions,
- documentation indicating the necessary resources for a task,
- an estimate of the time required to establish an effective maintenance schedule.
- PLAN AHEAD
A successful maintenance plan is built on two pillars:
- the availability of the required human competencies at any given time.
- the availability of the necessary spare parts in your stock.
Internal support for change is essential to effectively change corporate culture. As such, the entire company must be made aware of preventive measures.
Provide follow-up on regulatory controls
Whether movable or immovable, each asset must be inspected and controlled regularly according to an established schedule. These controls may be the responsibility of the employer, the manager, or the owner.
Maintenance teams are often responsible for these regulatory controls. The use of a CMMS provides easy access to all the information needed in an audit by an approved body. All the data is centralized in one digital hub and can be accessed instantly.
Track your planned maintenance easily
Explore a straightforward and efficient CMMS solution that enables you to:
- Define the maintenance schedule and preventive tasks for your assets,
- Execute your planned maintenance in the specified time and period,
- Measure the percentage of preventive tasks during a pre-established period,
- Communicate to the maintenance teams the results of the preventive maintenance program.
For an easier condition-based maintenance
Conditional maintenance is based on various key indicators and allows you to refine your preventive maintenance plan, and schedule targeted maintenance actions on an asset before a major failure occurs.
The use of an open and connected CMMS will inform your decisions with meter readings or measurements, thanks to our interfaces with the main SCADA, BMS/GTB, and MES solutions currently on the market. From a simple alert, a conditional preventive maintenance order can be triggered.
Towards predictive maintenance
Thanks to artificial intelligence, predictive maintenance can anticipate problems that could occur on your assets.
The DimoMaint CMMS eases the transition towards Industry 4.0 by allowing real-time machine data (monitored through IoT) to trigger maintenance work orders. Our teams will accompany you throughout the current revolution of maintenance tools.
We have noted a better ability to anticipate maintenance needs with a more dynamic preventive/corrective maintenance ratio that has increased from 40-60 to 70-30 today, thanks to the CMMS and the maintenance plan. From now on, we have visibility at any given moment via the cockpit.
Ben Ammar, Director of Maintenance – Ravinala Airports
