3 keys to getting a preventive

maintenance program back under

control
 Last Updated: February 26, 2018
 Jeffrey O'Brien

 
 2 min read

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3 Keys to Getting a Preventive Maintenance

Program Back Under Control
Preventive maintenance is a schedule of planned maintenance
actions aimed at the prevention of breakdowns and failures and
should be at the heart of any maintenance program. It has been
proven again and again that sporadic ongoing repair leads to
asset deterioration, a shorter asset lifetime and increased long-
term capital cost. The primary goal of a preventive maintenance
program is to prevent equipment failure before it actually occurs.
Standard preventive maintenance checks increase the lifetime
of your assets; reduce the need for repair or replacement, and
thus a healthier bottom line. Simply put, they keep your assets
in control.
In many organizations, PMs become a lower priority over time.
One of the excuses for skipping PMs or not performing PMs on
time is the unavailability of labour due to emergency repairs. As
the time required attending emergency repairs increases, the
time available for PMs decreases and more and more are
postponed or skipped. Compare the labour hours spent on
unscheduled repairs versus the labour hours spent on PMs. If
your unscheduled repair labour hours are high and your PM
labour hours are low, then either you are not performing your
PMs on time or not performing them at all. It is difficult to get out
of this downward spiral unless you step back and develop a
plan to get emergency repairs back under control. Your
preventive maintenance program is failing if your maintenance
guys are fighting fires when they shouldn’t have let the fires
start in the first place.

You simply cannot afford to ignore PMs on your assets. You will
never reduce unscheduled maintenance until you get your
preventive maintenance under control. Follow these three steps
to quickly getting your preventive maintenance back under
control:

1. Track your preventive maintenance in a CMMS

A good CMMS enables the facility manager, subordinates and

customers to track the status of preventive maintenance work
on their assets and the associated costs of that work in one
comprehensive system. The CMMS also helps track checklists in
your preventive maintenance procedures. Checklists ensure the
work is completed in a defined order and nothing is missed.

2. Work to the 10% rule

A simple way to improve your asset availability and reduce
unscheduled repair is to work to the 10% scheduled
maintenance rule for time-based PMs. Basically, the 10% rule
states that a preventive maintenance action should be
completed within 10% of the scheduled maintenance interval. For
example, a quarterly PM every 90 days, should be completed
within 9 days of the due date or it is out of compliance. The
10% rule helps keep your PM intervals constant, reducing the
time variable variation, thus improving reliability.

3. Ensure Metrics are in place to monitor

Feeding all maintenance information directly into a CMMS

solution facilitates the automatic manipulation of data to enable
operational, technical, and economic analysis such as repair vs.
replace. It also generates reports that provide evidence of
effective maintenance. A CMMS also gives you information
about your key metrics, or KPIs. Key metrics like Meantime
Between Failure (MTBF), PM compliance, Critical % should
always be captured, recorded and looked at for trends. Metrics
demonstrate how effective a preventive maintenance program
is. MBTF can help you identify your worst performing asset so
you can get a handle on it and get it back under control. Simple
analysis like this, in turn, provides knowledge of equipment
failure behaviour patterns with respect to other external and
internal factors such as “working” age, PM frequency, EHM
parameters and decision models, operational tradeoffs etc. We
can then use this knowledge to improve system availability and
ultimately, the company’s bottom line.
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