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Within a reliability-centered maintenance approach, preventive and predictive maintenance are top 2 most popular proactive methods of conducting maintenance. This prevents sudden issues or breakdowns from happening on your assets. Sudden breakdowns largely affect production, failure to achieve production target, the lack of personnel, unprepared spare parts and more.

A strong maintenance strategy involves standardizing and reviewing of new and existing strategies, enabling activity planning and scheduling of these activities. In addition, evaluating and analysing the results of the maintenance is needed.

Many companies are guilty of spending excessive amounts carrying out unnecessary or inadequate maintenance, resulting in a waste of resource utilisation and wasting over $200 billion worldwide. Bad maintenance is responsible for equipment failures, disrupted production schedules, delays in deliveries, and poor product quality. Preventive and Predictive maintenance techniques provide data that define required servicing and inspection periods so that maintenance departments can determine in advance when equipment must be shut down for overhaul.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance can be defined as “an equipment maintenance strategy based on replacing, or restoring, an asset at a fixed interval regardless of its condition”. Scheduled restoration tasks and replacement tasks are examples of preventive maintenance tasks.

Preventive maintenance (or preventative maintenance) is a type of maintenance that is done at a regular interval while the equipment is still functioning with the objective of preventing failure or reducing the likelihood of failure.

Preventive maintenance can be done on a time-based or usage-based basis. For example, time-based approach means it is done every week or every month. If it was done based on usage, this refers to every 150 cycles or every 10,000 hours, for example.

As with all maintenance types, there are potential drawbacks to relying solely on preventive maintenance. If the PM schedule isn’t regularly monitored, audited, and improved, “PM creep” can occur. This is when technicians get bogged down by unnecessary tasks and cost the organization time and money.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance is a maintenance strategy driven by predictive analytics. The solutions are used for detecting failure patterns or anomalies but are only deployed when there is high probability of imminent failure. Predictive maintenance uses data from machine sensors and smart technology to alert the maintenance team when a piece of equipment is at risk of failing.

This helps in deploying limited resources, maximizing device or equipment uptime, enhancing quality and supply chain processes, and thus improving the overall satisfaction for all the stakeholders involved.

Technique is designed to help determine the condition of in-service equipment to predict when maintenance should be performed. This approach promises cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted.

Other types of maintenance include:

• Time Based Maintenance (TBM)
• Failure Finding Maintenance (FFM)
• Risk Based Maintenance (RBM)
• Condition Based Maintenance (CBM)

Interested to read other articles? Check out: Why Maintenance Management is Important for Plant Operations?

Implementing Effective Preventive & Predictive Maintenance Course is a 3-day training course held from 26-28 June 2019 (Singapore) and 16-18 October 2019 (Singapore). The training course covers all facets of Preventive and Predictive Maintenance. It is designed to benefit every level of maintenance personnel, providing the most up to date facts and techniques on the maintenance technology that is revolutionising the way our industry operates. It examines the importance of PPM in a World Class Maintenance.