What is Planned Maintenance?
Also known as planned preventative maintenance, or PPM for short, planned maintenance of equipment and assets aims to reduce unexpected downtime and quickly restore normal operation after a malfunction. This involves following a predetermined schedule and established protocols for maintenance.
Maintaining your equipment and systems is crucial for avoiding unexpected breakdowns and costly repairs. Taking a proactive approach to planned maintenance can safeguard your assets and optimize their longevity and efficiency. It’s highly recommended that you monitor and maintain your equipment and systems to ensure smooth operation.
5 Types Of Planned Maintenance
Predictive Maintenance
Monitoring equipment parameters using sensors and condition monitoring techniques, known as predictive maintenance, identifies and predicts potential failures or performance deviations through real-time data analysis. Analyzing trends and patterns in the data helps organizations schedule maintenance activities precisely when needed, optimizing equipment uptime and reducing unnecessary maintenance.
Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance is a systematic approach of inspecting, servicing, and replacing equipment to prevent system failures. This process is carried out based on predetermined time intervals, usage thresholds, or recommendations from the manufacturer. Preventive maintenance tasks include lubrication, filter replacements, cleaning, calibrations, and visual inspections. By identifying and addressing potential issues before they become major problems, preventable maintenance ensures equipment reliability and longevity.
Corrective Maintenance
Corrective maintenance, known as breakdown maintenance, addresses equipment failures and is primarily a reactive approach. However, it can still be partially planned. In the event of a breakdown, the maintenance team responds promptly to get the equipment back up and running. Although this type of maintenance strives to minimize downtime, it’s not the most optimal type of planned maintenance for companies as it can lead to increased expenses and operational interruptions. A more desirable approach is proactive maintenance.
Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM)
Condition-based maintenance is a strategic approach of planned maintenance that is focusing on monitoring equipment health with specific parameters to determine its maintenance needs. It involves regular assessments carried out through techniques such as oil analysis, thermography, vibration analysis, or acoustic measurements. By monitoring vital equipment indicators, CBM ensures that maintenance is carried out only when certain conditions are met, thus boosting maintenance efficiency and minimizing downtime.
Reactive Maintenance
Reactive maintenance, also referred to as breakdown or run-to-failure maintenance, addresses equipment malfunctions only after they occur and require repair or maintenance. This maintenance approach lacks proactive inspections or preventive measures and depends on responding to equipment failures as they arise.
In reality, we are 2 main types of planned maintenance: Preventative Maintenance and Planned Unscheduled Maintenance:
- Preventative Maintenance: The purpose of planned preventative maintenance is to create a maintenance plan in advance that deals with possible issues before they arise. For instance, automobile manufacturers recommend a typical oil change every 3,000 miles to maintain optimal performance. Disregarding a regular maintenance schedule could lead to unexpected and inconvenient breakdowns.
- Planned Unscheduled Maintenance, also known as reactive maintenance: One way to approach maintenance is by addressing failures as they occur, even though a recovery plan is already in place to handle such situations. For instance, you might change the oil when the warning light comes on, and you have to respond immediately. By planning unscheduled maintenance, you can reduce maintenance expenses by avoiding urgent orders for replacement parts.
The 5 types of the planned maintenance we listed above represent the types of maintenance strategies each company can use for their different equipment inspections, testing and services.
A maintenance strategy is a plan that helps organizations manage their maintenance activities to ensure their assets perform optimally, are reliable, and have a long lifespan. This plan provides a framework and methods for prioritizing resources, managing tasks, and making informed decisions about maintenance.
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Planned Maintenance
Although there are some disadvantages to planned maintenance, the benefits outweigh them. It is important for organizations to plan and customize their maintenance strategies to achieve the right balance between reliability, cost-effectiveness, and operational efficiency. This implies regular evaluation and improvement of the maintenance program to ensure it aligns with organizational goals and evolving business requirements.
Advantages Of Planned Maintenance
- Enhancing Equipment Reliability – Regular maintenance can prevent equipment breakdowns, reduce downtime, increase productivity, and extend equipment lifespan.
- Cost Savings – Regular maintenance can save businesses money by preventing small problems from becoming bigger and more expensive. It can also help equipment use less energy, which reduces operational expenses.
- Improves Workplace Safety – Performing routine inspections and maintenance can effectively detect and resolve safety hazards that could lead to accidents or injuries. This proactive approach ensures a secure workplace for staff and minimizes the possibility of expensive legal liabilities.
- Regulatory compliance: To comply with regulatory standards, industries are obligated to keep their equipment in good working condition. To accomplish this, planned maintenance is implemented, which involves regular inspections and upkeep of all equipment.
Disadvantages Of Planned Maintenance
- Initial Costs: Creating a reliable maintenance program requires investment in personnel, training, tools, and software systems. Though it can be a hurdle for small businesses with restricted budgets, it ultimately promotes future cost savings.
- Skills And Expertise Required: Effective maintenance necessitates specialized professionals well-versed in inspections, diagnostics, and repairs. Despite its importance, organizations often have difficulties in attracting and retaining qualified technicians, particularly in highly specialized industries.
- Operations Interruption: When maintenance is scheduled, it can disrupt regular operations, particularly when equipment must be taken offline. To reduce the impact on production, it’s crucial for organizations to meticulously plan maintenance schedules and have backup systems or alternative production methods ready.
- Adjusting the Operational Needs: Regularly reviewing and adjusting maintenance plans to keep up with operational requirements, production schedules, and asset priority has its drawback as it involves extensive inspection, analysis, and plan adjustment. Ignoring updates can result in ineffective and outdated maintenance practices.
The 5 Steps Of Planned Maintenance
Creating an effective planned maintenance process may pose a challenge for some businesses, but it is crucial to maintain equipment at its best for optimal productivity, dependability, and value. Here are five steps to create an enduring scheme for preventive upkeep:
- Asset Identification
To maintain assets effectively, identify and categorize them. Determine each asset’s importance based on factors like its impact on operations, safety, and cost. Prioritize assets based on their level of criticality to establish a maintenance hierarchy.
- Maintenance Plan
To ensure the longevity of your assets, start by developing a thorough maintenance plan. This involves taking into account the manufacturer’s guidelines, industry norms, and regulatory requirements. Next, define the maintenance tasks and activities, and decide how often to do them based on all these factors.
- Establish Priorities
This step, also known as the maintenance schedule, involves prioritizing maintenance tasks. Operational needs, production schedules, and resource availability should be taken into account when deciding which tasks are most important when scheduling the maintenance.
- Implementation
Carry out scheduled maintenance activities according to their priority by assigning qualified maintenance personnel. Equipping these technicians with the requisite tools, supplies, and equipment is essential to ensuring their safety and efficacy while maintaining adherence to the maintenance schedule.
- Document and Review
It’s essential to maintain a record of maintenance tasks. Utilizing a planned maintenance software you can keep track of who performed the task, when it was completed, and any observations or findings. Additionally, ensure that all records for assets with a maintenance history, including repairs, dates, and component replacements, are up to date.
Conduct a thorough analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the effectiveness of maintenance activities, including equipment uptime, mean time between failures (MTBF), and maintenance costs.
Once you’ve collected, reviewed and analyzed the necessary data, take the time to identify areas of improvement. Make the necessary adjustments to maintenance schedules and plans to ensure maximum efficiency.
Implement a Planned Maintenance System Using GoAudits
Using preventive maintenance software can help you ensure compliance with your preventive maintenance plans. Choose the best planned maintenance software to help you with this process, without paperwork and heavy admin workload.
Our comprehensive preventive maintenance software helps you automate many of the manual tasks involved in the equipment inspection proces
- easier data collection in the field with smart forms
- instant reporting to share audit information quickly, pinpointing every non-conformances or highlighting critical non-conformances
- smart dashboards for real-time analysis
- Corrective actions that can be assigned to specific team members, internally or externally
- vast library of audit checklist templates which can be customized, to get started as quickly as possible.
Both your company and the external auditors will be able to access up-to-date information about the performance of your maintenance inspections at any time.
The best part? This whole process can be automated. With this approach, you can rest assured that your planned maintenance audits will go through without a hitch and that you’ll get the best results in no time.
Discover more about digital planned maintenance audits with GoAudits here.
Free Preventive Maintenance Audit Checklists
You can start your planned maintenance self-assessments immediately, simply check out the FREE Planned Maintenance Audit Checklists from the GoAudits checklist library:
General Planned Maintenance Checklists
Use these free preventive maintenance checklists to audit your equipment and assets:
HSE Maintenance Audit Checklist
HVAC Monthly Maintenance Check
Electrical Monthly Maintenance Check
General Maintenance, Health & Safety Checklist
Planned Maintenance Checklists For Buildings
Use these free preventive maintenance checklists to audit your buildings and facilities:
Warehouse Maintenance Checklist
Gym Daily Maintenance Checklist
Building Exterior Maintenance Checklist
Corridor Cleaning and Maintenance SOP
Corridor Cleaning & Maintenance Checklist
Planned Maintenance Checklists For Vehicles
Use these free preventive maintenance checklists to audit your vehicle fleet and keep a maintenance log:
Tractor Maintenance Checklists
Automotive Preventative Maintenance Checklist
Cannot find the exact checklist you require? Get in touch with our support team via Live chat. We can help you digitise your existing checklists or find additional ones.
