Preventive Maintenance: What is it, types and how to do it effectively?

Preventive maintenance, either to our own equipment or to our customers’ equipment, becomes a fundamental step to avoid more expensive reparation and to extend the lifetime of the equipment. In this article we explain from the different types of preventive maintenance to how to make an effective and automatic preventive maintenance plan.

1.- What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance is defined as the action of systematically checking equipment or devices of any type (mechanical, electrical, computer, etc…) under certain criteria in order to avoid breakdowns caused by use, wear and tear or the passage of time.

“Unlike corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance takes actions proactively in pursuit of diminishing upcoming problems.”.

Preventive maintenance pre-empts breakdowns before they occur or makes them less severe, thereby decreasing the expense of repairs and the time equipment becomes inoperative due to breakdowns.

2.- Types of preventive maintenance

There are three types of preventive maintenance and the set of all of them forms a maintenance plan; which is essential to perform a quality and professional maintenance work. These are the three main types of preventive maintenance:

• Scheduled maintenance: These are performed by time, kilometers or hours of operation.
• Predictive maintenance: It is performed at the end of the maximum estimated period of use
• Opportunity maintenance: The period in which the equipment is not being used is used to carry out maintenance and avoid production outages.

In addition, depending on the type of service and equipment to be serviced, we can also consider:

• Passive maintenance: By applying passive maintenance measures to our maintenance plan we are applying a layer of security so that the equipment always operates in excellent physical conditions and avoid external factors such as wear and tear due to weather conditions (rain, snow, humidity, heat) or intentional/accidental manipulations.
• Active maintenance: Depending on the quality and type of the components to be preventively maintained, the wear and tear of the components due to use should be monitored more regularly.

As we have already commented above, the sum of all these types of maintenance give rise to the maintenance plan, which is the basis for being able to offer a timely, quality and profitable maintenance service, both for the receiving company and for the company offering the service.

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3.- How to do preventive maintenance

To carry out quality preventive maintenance, we must start with an effective maintenance plan and use tools that make our day-to-day management easier. These are the steps to carry out a preventive maintenance:

• Objective statement: Starting from the fact that preventive maintenance arises from the need to minimize corrective actions (breakdown repairs), increase equipment lifetime and increase equipment availability among others (we can also add, for example ; reduce labor risks, avoid raw material losses due to bad processing…). We must quantify this improvement in order to continue with the rest of the plan, for example:Reduce breakdowns by 70%.
• Budget on machinery, inventories and labor hours:We should make a calculation on the estimated amount of components, subcomponents and labor we will need to cover the maintenance of all the machinery. This way we will be able to analyze in the future our real and expected profitability.
• Review of previous maintenance: We will have to take into account the sum of all previous maintenance, how they were made, dates, responsible and material used. If they did not exist, we will start from zero.
• Consultation of manuals, documentation and legal requirements: We must follow the official documentation to perform the maintenance, as well as having it always at hand before and during the maintenance action. In addition, the staff must comply with the rules of occupational risk prevention.
• Choosing the type of maintenance and the person in charge of performing it: This is the most important task, since we will have to take into account what type of maintenance is necessary and who will do it. It will vary according to the type of machinery, but the person in charge will almost always be the same for recurring maintenance.
• Execution of the plan and follow-up: Once the plan has been made, we must have a guide to follow it and be able to have under control all the equipment, dates and people responsible for the maintenance.

To do this in the most professional way, we must have an automated process that allows us to have under control the machinery to do maintenance, official documentation, photos or signatures that accredit our work and the subsequent billing of the whole process in the most efficient way.

Doing it manually or on paper leads to losing important documentation, signatures or not having full control over the profitability of our maintenance, which is why it is necessary to adopt a program adapted for mobile companies and that can be used from anywhere, even offline.

The most used option by freelancers and SMEs is STEL Order in its mobile version that allows companies to create budgets, work reports, invoice them and keep track of all the tasks performed in just a few clicks, in addition to being able to create recurring tasks to assist in maintenance and have all the technicians synchronized among themselves and with the office.