7 Key Elements of a Solid Preventive Maintenance Plan

Businesses are always looking for ways to maximize equipment availability, minimize disruptions and lower their overall maintenance and repair costs. For that reason, a growing number of companies are focused on moving away from reactive or corrective maintenance and implementing preventive maintenance (PM) plans at their facilities.

While corrective maintenance programs wait to address issues until they have already occurred, preventive maintenance offers a proactive approach to maintaining equipment, anticipating potential issues, resolving problems before they cause breakdowns and improving the overall lifespan of your most critical equipment.

Preventive maintenance work involves regular inspections, equipment servicing and proactive repairs to keep your assets in optimal working condition. This critical maintenance strategy ultimately allows businesses to increase productivity, enhance cost savings and improve safety for workers. Read on to learn about the benefits and elements of a solid preventive maintenance plan to streamline your maintenance operations in no time.

7 Basic Elements of Preventive Maintenance

An effective preventive maintenance program typically relies on a robust maintenance framework that comprises the following seven core elements:

1. Testing: Equipment should be regularly tested and evaluated to ensure its meeting performance benchmarks and to identify potential issues before they result in equipment failure.
2. Servicing: Routine maintenance tasks, including oil changes and parts replacements, ensure proper equipment operation and improve asset longevity.
3. Calibration: Equipment settings should be regularly adjusted to meet specified operational standards and to ensure optimal performance and lifecycle.
4. Inspection: Regular examinations of the equipment, including internal parts that degrade over time, is critical to identifying wear and tear that could result in equipment failure.
5. Adjustment: As-needed adjustments to equipment may be required to maximize equipment performance.
6. Alignment: Proper alignment of equipment components reduces wear and tear on spare parts, extending the lifespan of components and reducing the risk of breakdown.
7. Installation: Proper installation of new equipment is critical to ensure the asset is optimized for performance, calibrated to the manufacturer’s specifications, and set up with a strong foundation for your future maintenance processes.

Key Benefits of Preventive Maintenance

Compared to reactive maintenance methods, a preventive maintenance program offers a number of advantages enhancing operational efficiency and asset management. Those advantages include:

• Reduced rates of unplanned downtime: By addressing potential issues early, preventive maintenance minimizes disruptions that can grind operations to a halt — resulting in a significant loss of productivity and revenue generation for your business. 
• Increased asset lifespans: Reduced wear and tear and proactive parts replacement supports the healthy, uninterrupted operation of your equipment — which will ultimately extend the useful life of these assets.
• Controlled maintenance costs: Proactive maintenance reduces the need for expensive emergency repairs and replacements. Regular maintenance activities can be scheduled overnight or during windows of time where their disruption to equipment operations is minimized.
• Improved safety for your work environments: Fewer equipment failures means fewer incidents putting your workers at risk. By identifying and mitigating hazards before they strike, facilities can exert greater control over the safety of these environments, resulting in fewer accidents.

Key Components of a Solid Preventive Maintenance Program

Whether you’re building a PM plan from scratch or looking to optimize an existing program at your facility, an effective program strategy is required to help you implement and manage this program across all assets under your control. Here’s an overview of the six critical components of any preventive maintenance program:

Asset Inventory Management

Any preventive maintenance program should start with building a comprehensive inventory of all assets. This inventory should include detailed information about each asset, including:

• Make and model
• Serial numbers
• Installation dates
• Maintenance history

A well-maintained inventory will be a constant point of reference as you manage equipment maintenance activities. Maintenance teams, for example, can use installation dates to schedule period servicing and calibration tasks, while serial numbers will be necessary if any manufacturing defects are identified with your equipment.

If you use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software to manage your maintenance program, all of your management tasks within the platform will be tied to your asset inventory data. Ultimately, this documented, digitized data can be used to ensure that each piece of equipment receives timely maintenance care that is specific to its unique needs and tailored to its individual maintenance history.

Maintenance Prioritization

Certain equipment requires more preventive care than others. Likewise, certain maintenance needs are more urgent than others due to the potential disruption and/or other forms of risk posed by delayed maintenance for that asset.

Maintenance prioritization helps you adapt your PM program by categorizing equipment and related preventive maintenance activities based on equipment usage, failure history, criticality and other criteria. Mission-critical assets can be given more frequent servicing and other preventive care, and/or they can be bumped to the front of the line when a new maintenance need arises.

This approach to prioritization ensures that maintenance teams are putting their resources toward the most critical tasks — which in turn helps your business drive more value from its operations. A CMMS platform allows maintenance leaders to take a rules-based approach to prioritization, relying on the platform to automate the organization of maintenance tasks in order of their priority level.

Preventive Maintenance Schedule

Structured maintenance schedules enable greater consistency for your preventive maintenance program. Day-to-day maintenance schedules should detail the specific tasks to be performed on an individual and team-wide basis. Long-term scheduling, meanwhile, can ensure that each asset receives the preventive maintenance it requires on a specific usage-based or time-based schedule — whether those tasks need to be repeated daily, monthly, quarterly or once a year. 

A CMMS platform can facilitate easier, more efficient scheduling by automatically scheduling maintenance based on each asset’s manufacturer recommendations and by pushing automated reminders when maintenance tasks are due or overdue. Platform-based scheduling tools can also help managers track maintenance progress and monitor teams remotely.

Consistent scheduling is critical to ensuring that your preventive maintenance program will be sustainable and effective in managing maintenance needs across all your equipment. Without a trustworthy method of scheduling this work, maintenance teams will inevitably overlook certain essential tasks that could otherwise prevent a costly, disruptive equipment failure.

Preventive Maintenance Software

Whether you’re managing maintenance at a single facility or multiple separate properties, preventive maintenance software can serve as the engine of your PM program — providing the automation and remote work order management capabilities you need to consistently execute your maintenance program at scale.

PM software enables maintenance teams to track and manage work orders, store and retrieve comprehensive asset information, autogenerate maintenance schedules and monitor key performance metrics relevant to your maintenance efforts. By centralizing asset data and maintenance activities within a single platform, maintenance managers can efficiently communicate with maintenance technicians and other stakeholders as well as coordinate activities and efficiently respond to new maintenance needs.

Automated reminders, data analytics and real-time updates on maintenance tasks allows the maintenance department to operate with more coordination and efficiency. Managers can easily track the day’s activities to make sure top priorities are being addressed and to reallocate resources as new needs and challenges arise. Businesses can use this software investment to elevate the production and efficacy of both their owned equipment and their maintenance personnel.

Effective Communication

Improved communication channels facilitate more effective management of maintenance teams while also improving the ability for teams to collaborate on collective maintenance efforts. CMMS platforms can support a wide range of communication channels, including app-based messaging, email and real-time platform updates, to keep all relevant parties informed of the latest development and progress related to specific maintenance tasks.

While improved communication channels streamline management tasks and keep everyone informed on what needs to be done, it also enables greater accountability for maintenance workers and teams. Team members can gain a better understanding of how their work fits into the larger picture of maintaining equipment at your facility, and inefficiencies can be more easily addressed to optimize performance for your maintenance teams.

And, if new and urgent maintenance tasks develop, workers can relay this information quickly to managers — ensuring they can make faster, more informed decisions that shift maintenance priorities and reallocate resources to the most pressing areas of need.

Alignment on Maintenance KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) offer valuable insights into the success of your PM program. With the right set of maintenance KPIs in place, maintenance managers can evaluate the effectiveness of their current efforts and identify potential areas of improvement.

Common KPIs used to measure preventive maintenance success include:

• Mean time between failure (MTBF): MTBF represents the typical amount of time that passes between equipment failures for a single asset.
• Maintenance cost per asset: This reflects the average maintenance cost, including labor and materials, that your fleet of assets incurs over a given period of time.
• Scheduled maintenance compliance rate: This reflects the percentage of maintenance tasks that are completed on-schedule. 

While the above KPIs don’t provide a comprehensive picture of your preventive maintenance program, they can offer strong foundational insights reflecting your successes and shortcomings. A low rate of scheduled maintenance compliance, for example, suggests that your maintenance teams are struggling to complete preventive maintenance tasks on the optimal timeline. By contrast, a decline in your average maintenance cost per asset could be an indication that your preventive maintenance program is starting to pay dividends through measurable cost reductions.

Maintenance managers should monitor these KPIs to identify trends, diagnose possible issues with your existing program and lean into the optimizations resulting from your emphasis on prevention.

How to Implement Your PM Program Efficiently

Ready to launch a preventive maintenance program? Here’s a rough step-by-step guide to getting started:

1. Define your maintenance goals: Establish clear objectives to guide your initial strategy. For example, are you primarily focused on increasing machine uptime, extending equipment lifespans and/or lowering the overall asset maintenance costs? These goals will also dictate the types of KPIs that will be most valuable in assessing program success.
2. Prioritize which assets require preventive maintenance.: There’s a good chance that most, if not all of your assets, require some degree of preventive maintenance. But some assets may have more critical PM needs than others. Some facilities may prefer to start their preventive maintenance program by focusing only on these critical areas of need.
3. Create procedures and checklists for individual PM work to ensure consistency: Detailed checklists improve team member accountability and ensure consistency across your PM program. If you use a CMMS software, this platform can help you implement and enforce these procedures across all teams.
4. Train your maintenance team: Equip maintenance staff with the knowledge and skills required to execute the program effectively. This may include training on the CMMS platform, an explanation of how your PM strategy is shifting away from reactive maintenance, and tutorials on any new technologies they may be using for communication or other day-to-day activities.
5. Create a PM schedule: Develop schedules for all preventive maintenance needs across all of your assets. Consider using a CMMS to create and automate schedule creation and task reminders. This will significantly reduce the manual labor required by management to develop and maintain these PM schedules.
6. Use a CMMS to track PM tasks: Your CMMS platform can be used to assign tasks, monitor progress, communicate with team members and analyze PM performance.
7. Review your performance and optimize your PM program over time: As you evaluate KPIs and learn more about your existing PM program, you will identify possible changes that can improve the consistency, functionality and impact of your preventive maintenance. Effective management of a PM program involves making ongoing refinements to optimize this program for greater long-term success.

How Coast Can Enhance Your PM Program

Coast’s CMMS solution is built with everything maintenance leaders need to launch, manage and optimize a successful PM program at any scale. When you use Coast to enable preventive maintenance, you can take advantage of the following features:

• QR codes for easy asset tracking: QR codes allow team members to scan and retrieve key data for every asset. This digitized system ensures that assets and their maintenance information never get lost.
• Customizable fields for asset inventory information: Tailor work order forms and asset information to your specific needs. For preventive maintenance teams, custom fields specific to the asset’s maintenance history may improve the efficacy of your PM efforts.
• Automated scheduling for PM tasks: Use Coast’s CMMS to automatically schedule tasks on a daily, monthly or other maintenance cadence, ensuring that PM needs are always met on a timely basis.
• PM reminders and notifications: Keep team members informed about upcoming tasks through individualized dashboards and notifications that are sent to their mobile device. Quickly alert them to new maintenance priorities and other essential information relevant to their daily work.
• The ability to upload photo and task lists: Attach images and preventive maintenance checklists to messages sent through Coast’s CMMS, improving the quality and efficiency of your team’s communications.

For Preventive Maintenance, You Need Coast

A preventive maintenance program is your company’s ticket to reducing equipment downtime, increasing cost savings, improving worker safety and extending the useful lifespan of your assets. 

But there’s an easy way and a hard way to approach preventive maintenance. The hard way? Managing these complex schedules and tasks all by yourself.

The easy way? Implementing Coast’s CMMS as the hub for your company’s PM program. With the help of Coast’s powerful, flexible CMMS infrastructure, maintenance leaders can implement a consistent, efficient and optimized PM program in any environment, and at any scale.

Find out for yourself — sign up for a free account to learn more.