What Is Preventive Maintenance? (Types, Examples & Benefits)

Nobody likes unexpected breakdowns or costly repairs, but it’s the stuff of nightmares for any property manager or business owner. Picture this: angry tenants yelling on the phone complaining about their malfunctioning HVAC system and then receiving an unexpected invoice for repairs totaling $15,000. This scenario is a stark reminder of what happens when you don’t have a preventive maintenance strategy in place. Without proactive maintenance measures to maintain your equipment, you’re left vulnerable to costly surprises, disgruntled customers and financial strain.

Ready to shift from reactive to proactive maintenance? We’ll show you how to create a preventive maintenance plan to help reduce costly equipment failures.

What Is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance is about being proactive. You regularly inspect, service and maintain your equipment or facilities to prevent unexpected breakdowns. Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and reacting to it, preventive maintenance involves scheduling routine checks and regular maintenance activities. Think lubrication, adjustments and replacements to keep assets in optimal working condition.

Preventive maintenance is undeniably critical to any maintenance strategy. It’s key to lowering maintenance costs, reducing unplanned downtime, improving asset lifespan and efficiency, and increasing workplace safety. The goal of preventive maintenance is to prevent potential failure before it occurs and to reduce the risk of accidents. Ultimately, taking certain precautions to ensure minimal risk to your business means that you can focus on improving what already works, instead of repairing what is broken.

Any type of maintenance that is not reactive (i.e., a response to a problem, malfunctioning equipment, technology) is preventive, and there are many different types of preventive maintenance that relate to different areas of a business or specific timing. 

Types of Preventive Maintenance

Time-based maintenance, usage-based maintenance, condition-based maintenance, predictive maintenance and prescriptive maintenance are all different types of preventive maintenance. Here’s how to differentiate each of them:

Time-Based Maintenance

Time-based maintenance, also known as interval-based maintenance, is a maintenance strategy in which maintenance tasks are scheduled based on predetermined time intervals. In this approach, critical equipment or machinery undergo maintenance activities at regular intervals regardless of the asset’s usage or condition. Examples of interval-based maintenance include servicing the air conditioning every month during the summer, replenishing salt for soft water systems and cleaning vents to comply with health standards at least twice per year.

Preventive maintenance tasks (or PM tasks) are performed regularly to minimize the risk of unexpected failures and maintain equipment reliability and increase uptime. Create a monthly or annual maintenance schedule that follows manufacturer recommendations for inspecting and cleaning equipment to keep you on track.

Usage-Based Maintenance

Usage-based maintenance is when maintenance tasks are carried out based on equipment usage. For instance, maintenance tasks are scheduled for a hydraulic system when fluid contamination levels reach a critical point. Whether it’s a vehicle oil change or an essential piece of machinery that reaches a certain number of hours, staying on top of proper maintenance ensures long-lasting use of important equipment.

Condition-Based Maintenance

Condition-based maintenance involves condition monitoring of your most crucial assets to identify maintenance activities and needs. It relies on sensors to capture real-time information about equipment (such as temperature sensors or vibration sensors) for anomalies. For example, an infrared sensor could gather extreme temperature data from far away, showing that a piece of manufacturing equipment is operating above its standard temperature. This maintenance approach is different in that it’s not on a set schedule but more based on the condition metrics for a piece of equipment.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance (PdM) goes a step further. It combines condition monitoring with machine learning to predict a system crash before it happens. PdM is especially helpful in manufacturing and energy industries that require more complex equipment. It automates work orders to help managers predict downtime based on past trends. This way they can schedule preventive maintenance tasks to reduce crashes on critical operational equipment.

Prescriptive Maintenance

Taking it yet another step further than PdM, prescriptive maintenance uses advanced analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to generate predictions about maintenance, and to also act on them. Prescriptive maintenance makes recommendations to improve system operations and also follows up on its own to produce a work order and oversee the entire process.

Sound advanced? That’s because it probably is for most businesses. As long as you’re manually checking essential equipment and staying on top of manufacturer recommendations, you’re well on your way to effective preventive maintenance.

7 Basic Elements of Preventive Maintenance

An effective preventive maintenance plan 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 preventive maintenance processes.

Benefits of Preventive Maintenance

One of the most obvious benefits of implementing a PM program is that you’re pre-empting issues before they occur. Here are some other benefits:

• Reduces business disruptions and less closures: Minimizing unexpected equipment failures reduces the likelihood of business disruptions and closures by ensuring that machinery operates smoothly and reliably.
• Increases asset’s lifecycle: When you regularly service your machinery, you increase the equipment lifespan, bringing you great cost savings in that you won’t need to replace equipment as often.
• Controls labor costs: Carrying out regular maintenance reduces the risk of after-hour breakdowns. Maintenance technicians will work only during scheduled hours, eliminating unexpected labor costs that come with emergency maintenance callouts.
• Eliminates potential safety risks: When you address issues proactively, you prevent them from escalating. This simple step eliminates potential safety risks.

Disadvantages of Preventive Maintenance

You might be wondering: How could there possibly be a downside to staying prepared? But there are a few drawbacks to regular preventive maintenance, such as:

• Time-consuming: It can take a lot of time to carry out regular inspections across all your assets, especially if you have a lot of assets. It’s worth noting, however, that with a proper PM plan, you can space out your inspections.
• Costs more: Let’s face it, there’s more planning, preparation and upfront costs involved when you’re trying to make sure your assets do not run to failure.
• Overdoing it: “Over maintenance” is a real thing. It occurs when you excessively maintain your assets under the impression that you’re preventing breakdowns, whereas you’re accidentally causing them instead.

How to Avoid Too Much Preventive Maintenance

You can avoid over maintenance by creating a preventive maintenance program. This program should include your preventive maintenance schedule that will ensure your planned maintenance is conducted at the right intervals, which will minimize the risk of over maintenance.

Always carefully consider whether a preventive action really needs to be performed. A good rule of thumb is: If you go past the optimum point of repairs and inspections on a particular piece of equipment, you’re doing too much preventive maintenance and wasting money. Only take preventive maintenance actions when the benefits of doing so will outweigh the risks and costs.

How Much Does Preventive Maintenance Cost to Implement?

The cost boils down to labor costs and, ultimately, to the number of machines and utilities you need improved or protected.

It’s important not to exceed your maintenance budget. Do what you can, where you can, to avoid future damages to your business caused by preventable accidents. This can be as simple and as budget-friendly as manually cleaning a ventilation system, increasing lubrication frequency on equipment or spending one hour training staff to operate certain machinery safely and effectively.

To determine how much of your budget should be allocated to preventive maintenance, you should:

1. Add up the total cost of your reactive maintenance for the past year
2. Consider the value of all your equipment

This will give you a good idea of how much you can potentially save in the way of reactive maintenance, in addition to the savings you’ll enjoy from extending the life of your equipment.

How to Implement an Effective Preventive Maintenance Plan

Ready to launch a preventive maintenance plan? 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 maintenance 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. For example, facility maintenance teams may prefer to start their preventive maintenance program by focusing only on 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 or an explanation of how your PM strategy is shifting away from reactive maintenance. You can also provide tutorials on new technologies used 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: A CMMS platform helps assign tasks, monitor progress, communicate with team members and analyze PM performance.
7. Review your performance and optimize your PM program over time: By reviewing KPIs, you can refine your preventive maintenance plan for better results. Effective management of a PM program involves making ongoing refinements to optimize this program for greater long-term success.

Examples of Preventive Maintenance

Let’s briefly touch on a few specific examples of preventive maintenance:

• Check your HVAC system: If your A/C fails in summer, you’ll lose customers, negatively impacting your business. Routinely inspect your HVAC system (preferably seasonably) to avoid costly repairs in the event of future damage.
• Check critical assets: Your most-used equipment contributes to your overall success. For example, if you own a restaurant, a walk-in refrigerator is going to be one of your essential assets — your business can’t function without it. For regular refrigerator maintenance, it’s important to check door seals, defrost built-up ice, check the drip pan and drain hole, and clean the condenser coils every so often. Consider performing these tasks once per month when it comes to maintaining the optimum functionality of your most critical assets.
• Inspect all essential business vehicles: Be sure to have essential business vehicles inspected as frequently. Failure to perform routine maintenance could result in breakdowns, engine failure and dangerous driving conditions. If possible, set up service reminders via an app, or check your mileage to stay on top of vehicle inspections. This type of basic preventive maintenance will ensure that your vehicles perform optimally for your business’ success.
• Complete property maintenance for communities: Running an apartment complex? Do routine inspections. This keeps tenants safe and preserves the property’s value. Water damage, for instance, can be detrimental to community living, but it’s easily preventable by making routine maintenance part of your workflow. Some examples of property maintenance include regularly checking roofs and gutters, bathroom plumbing and appliances.

Preventive maintenance can be as complicated or as simple as you make it. It’s important to focus on only a handful of preventive maintenance checklists at a time to keep the process manageable and cost-effective.

How Can Preventive Maintenance Software Help?

Historically, maintenance teams tracked PMs using pen and paper or spreadsheets. Both are very manual and time-consuming and don’t always lead to an accurate analysis. Preventive maintenance software (aka computerized maintenance management system software or CMMS software) provides a better solution. These helpful programs efficiently create and schedule work orders digitally for preventive maintenance. This greatly reduces the time you’d otherwise spend tracking systems manually. Furthermore, many software providers are quite affordable and keep all your maintenance history in one place.

Using preventive maintenance software enables you to streamline your asset management system. You can create and submit digital work order forms in one streamlined system that also allows you to modify completed or in-process repairs and maintenance. Technicians can easily access all of the preventive maintenance work orders they need to perform. Then, the software will automatically send alerts and reminders about when the next inspection is due. Moreover, you’ll also have the ability to track work orders from start to finish. You’ll even receive access to real-time data and trends that show equipment downtime, repair costs and even causes of issues.

Sound too good to be true? Create your first preventive maintenance task for free using Coast.