Is your preventive

maintenance even
worth doing?
Brought to you by: Road to Reliability™ Erik Hupjé
©2022 R2 Reliability Pty Ltd www.roadtoreliabity.com
Research and experience show that up to 60% of
Preventive Maintenance (PM) tasks aren’t
really adding value — all they do is just take
time and money away from your already very
limited resource pool.
Some of the most common
reasons for this are:

1. Tasks are duplicated.

2. Tasks are done too frequently or not frequent enough

3. Tasks are not effective at addressing the failure mode

4. Too many fixed-time, intrusive overhaul tasks that

would be more effective, less costly, and less
disruptive to production if they were condition-based.

5. Lack of using existing failure data and experience to

set good task frequencies.
Yet far worse is that not only do
these tasks add no value, they
blind us to critical and high-risk
failure modes that actually do
need our attention, and do need
preventive maintenance...
The companies that know this have already
undergone programs to improve and optimise
their PM programs. But the results of those
improvement programsare often not in the
public domain.

Luckily, there’s a published case study that is

arguably one of the most striking examples
showing how there’s so much waste in our PM.
It’s the comparison of two airplanes:
The comparison goes like this:

The DC-8’s maintenance schedule was developed

using traditional, time-based concepts — you
replace components before they reach a certain
“age”, in hopes to prevent failure.

Using this maintenance schedule, the DC-8 crew

overhauled 339 components and called for more
than 4,000,000 labour hours before reaching 20,000
operating hours (and no, that is not a typo!).
On the other hand…

The DC-10’s maintenance schedule was derived by

applying Reliability Centered Maintenance.
This required only 7 component overhauls and
66,000 labour hours to reach the same 20,000
operating hours!

You can see the extraordinary amount of resources

that were saved, despite the DC-10 actually being the
bigger, more complex plane.
The benefits of RCM are significant and have been
demonstrated many times over. Yet in industry,
RCM is notorious for being resource-intensive and
hard to get results from.

DC-8 DC-10 / 747-100

Maintenance effort without RCM: Maintenance effort optimised through RCM:

4,000,000 labour hours to reach 60,000 labour hours to reach 20,000
20,000 operating hours operating hours

Overhaul of 339 components Overhaul of 7 components

Larger and more complex than the DC-8

Don't RCM everything...
Instead, you can simply apply the foundational
principles of RCM in your PM program with a lot
less effort by applying the following 9 principles:

Brought to you by: Road to Reliability™ Erik Hupjé

©2022 R2 Reliability Pty Ltd www.roadtoreliabity.com
 PRINCIPLE #1:

Accept failures

Not all failures can be prevented by

maintenance. In some cases, the impact of the
failure is so low that we simply accept it. Good
maintenance programs don’t try to prevent
every failure.
 PRINCIPLE #2:

Most failures are not

age related

Over 70% of failure modes are not age-related. In

these cases, there is no point in doing time-based
life-renewal tasks like servicing or replacement.
Condition monitoring would be more effective.
 PRINCIPLE #3:

Some failures matter

more than others

Good maintenance programs are risk-based.

They consider both the consequence and the
likelihood of failure. They use this information to
assess where to use our scarce resources to get
the greatest benefit.
 PRINCIPLE #4:

Parts might wear out,

but your equipment
breaks down

Parts are simple components that have their own

failure modes and failure patterns. Most modern
machinery consists of many parts and should be
treated as complex items.

Because complex items have so many different failure

modes, they don’t typically exhibit wear out, which
makes time-based overhauls ineffective and wasteful.
 PRINCIPLE #5:

Hidden failures must

be found

Hidden failures are failures that remain

undetected during normal operation. They’re
often associated with equipment with protective
functions. These failures only become evident
when you need an item to work and it doesn’t
(failure on demand), or when you conduct a
failure-finding task.
 PRINCIPLE #6:

Identical equipment
does not mean identical
maintenance

It’s possible to have two identical pieces of

equipment operating in very different contexts
(e.g., the classic duty-versus-standby case). A
difference in criticality can also lead to different
maintenance needs.
 PRINCIPLE #7:

“You can’t maintain your

way to reliability”
Terrence O'Hanlon

No amount of maintenance can raise the

inherent reliability of a design. When a poor
design is the cause of poor reliability or
performance, the only solution is to change
the design.
 PRINCIPLE #8:

Good maintenance
programs don’t waste
your resources

Completing tasks that don’t add value,

maintaining an unnecessary level of
performance, and assigning multiple tasks to a
single failure mode are all examples of wasteful
practices that should be avoided.
 PRINCIPLE #9:

Good maintenance
programs become better
maintenance programs

The most effective maintenance programs are

dynamic and continuously improving. These
programs look for ways to eliminate
unnecessary tasks, convert time-based tasks
into condition-based tasks, and extend task
intervals.
 Final thoughts

Now that you’ve come to realize the 9

principles of modern preventive
maintenance, the question now is this: How
do you use these principles to improve your
preventive maintenance program?
If you’re interested, then you
can answer that question by
reading this article:

How to improve your

preventive maintenance
program.

Brought to you by: Road to Reliability™ Erik Hupjé

©2022 R2 Reliability Pty Ltd www.roadtoreliabity.com