Planned Maintenance

What is Planned Maintenance?

Effective planning is a cornerstone in various industries, and in the realm of maintenance, meticulous planning of tasks holds paramount importance for a company’s overall success. The thoughtful allocation of time and resources to identify maintenance tasks, their execution methods, and required resources is an investment that yields dividends in the form of enhanced equipment utilization and reduced maintenance costs. This principle forms the bedrock of maintenance.

While often mistaken for scheduled maintenance, planned maintenance and scheduled maintenance are distinct yet complementary activities within a comprehensive maintenance strategy. Think of this maintenance as the substantial element, encompassing thorough inspections, analyses, and traditional preventive and predictive maintenance practices.

By delving into root causes of failures, asset lifespan assessments, and repair histories, one can ascertain the most efficient blend of short and long-term activities to maximize uptime and safety. Once this groundwork is established, scheduled maintenance, facilitated by maintenance software, becomes instrumental in managing the intricacies of resources, dates, and times, ensuring a well-coordinated system that stays on course.

What Are The Advantages of Planned Maintenance?

Efficiency Boost and Cost Reduction: Devoting energy to a systematic maintenance approach directly impacts efficiency and results in tangible cost reductions. This spans from diminished expenses linked to unplanned breakdowns to savings on spare parts and labor.

Minimized Repair Costs: Proactively identifying potential root causes through Planned maintenance helps mitigate the risk of catastrophic failures, effectively minimizing repair costs. Additionally, these practices contribute to extending the overall lifespan of assets.

Optimized Maintenance Plan: Striking a balance between maintenance expenses, equipment value, and productivity impact, an intelligent maintenance planning and scheduling process prioritizes critical equipment. This strategic approach applies analysis to the broader equation, considering both direct and indirect benefits.

Enhanced Employee Well-being: Well-planned procedures and coordinated workloads alleviate employee stress and confusion, fostering more consistent practices. This shared playbook encourages cross-training and collaboration, ultimately improving morale among team members.

Improved Workplace Safety: The benefits of a well-thought-out maintenance strategy extend to enhanced workplace safety. By curbing exposure to potentially hazardous breakdowns and disruptions, planned maintenance practices play a crucial role in maintaining a safe work environment.

Planned and Reactive Maintenance

Reactive maintenance, often labeled as “run to failure,” stands in stark contrast to the proactive nature of planned maintenance. In the reactive approach, action is initiated only after visible equipment compromise or complete breakdown, eliminating the need for planned preventive maintenance or continuous equipment monitoring. While this minimizes ongoing maintenance expenses, the downside lies in the unpredictability of potential high repair or replacement costs at any given moment.

Planned maintenance, on the other hand, utilizes monitoring, analysis, and proactive servicing to preemptively address issues, avoiding costly breakdowns. By incorporating known root causes of failure, planned activities aim to sustain peak operating condition until the next scheduled maintenance cycle. This approach emphasizes predictability concerning spare parts consumption, scheduled downtime, and overall asset lifespan.

The concept of planned reactive maintenance may seem counterintuitive but involves a deliberate choice to exclude certain equipment from the planned maintenance system and allow it to run to failure. Unlike unplanned reactive maintenance, the planned reactive strategy is grounded in a comprehensive analysis of preventive or predictive maintenance costs, safety considerations, equipment lifespan, organizational value, and replacement cost.

Successfully implementing a planned reactive maintenance plan requires careful consideration of equipment budgets, lead times, and installation planning contingencies. For instance, equipment with predictable life spans but poor accessibility and relatively low purchase prices may be strategically allowed to run to failure, particularly if breakdowns do not compromise safety and replacements can be expedited, contributing to efficient equipment utilization.

Planned and Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance involves routine care at predefined intervals on properly functioning equipment. These tasks, such as inspections, adjustments, cleaning, and lubrication, aim to maintain smooth operation and reduce the risk of unexpected breakdowns. Effective planning is a cornerstone of any preventive maintenance system.

Plans for preventive maintenance include triggers based on time or usage, often following manufacturer recommendations or standard intervals like 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years for legacy equipment. The planned maintenance approach involves meticulous analysis and historical review to determine optimal intervals, preventing breakdowns without excessive part consumption or technician time.

Planning extends to establishing clear preventive maintenance procedures and work orders. Well-defined instructions and focused planned maintenance operations enhance efficiency with each cycle. Both planned and preventive maintenance prioritize proactivity, eliminating temporary solutions, constant firefighting, and undocumented work practices. These practices contribute to optimal equipment utilization over time.

Implementing a Planned Maintenance System

Identify Key Stakeholders and Contributors:

• Prioritize the identification of key stakeholders, team leaders, and contributors early on.
• Secure buy-in and allocate resources effectively to lay the foundation for a successful planned maintenance system launch.

Data Collection and Analysis:

• Utilize advanced maintenance software from the outset for streamlined organization and storage of crucial data.
• Conduct comprehensive data collection and analysis, focusing on equipment lifespan, maintenance history, part consumption, and failure rates.

Establish Reliability and Compliance Goals:

• During the implementation phase, set clear goals for reliability and compliance.
• Define measurable objectives that will guide the development and success of this maintenance system.

Critical Asset Analysis and Prioritization:

• Perform a critical analysis to identify assets requiring the most attention, aiding in prioritization post-launch.
• Establish ground rules, objectives, and detailed procedures, shaping service processes, monitoring methods, and desired intervals.

Training for Smooth Implementation:

• Prior to launch, conduct comprehensive training sessions for staff to ensure effective adoption of the new system and practices.
• Foster a synergistic relationship between planning and training to facilitate a smoother implementation process.

System Launch and Monitoring:

• Execute the planned maintenance system launch with a well-defined structure in place.
• Implement robust monitoring mechanisms, tracking task completion, reviewing maintenance KPIs, and integrating technician observations and feedback.
• By methodically following these steps, organizations can navigate the complexities of implementing a system, fostering efficiency, reliability, and long-term equipment utilization. This strategic roadmap ensures a comprehensive approach from stakeholder engagement to post-launch monitoring.

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Software

CMMS software is a vital element at the center of a successful deployment. Information regarding equipment utilization, downtime, spare parts availability, and mean time between failures can be utilized to establish plans and reports that trend asset performance and aid in decision making.

Maintenance planning and scheduling software also improves efficiency by automating work requests, standardizing processes, and increasing resource visibility. Planned maintenance software provides tools to help prioritize and assign tasks and track their associated expenses over time.

CMMS software from MicroMain provides the tools and features necessary to establish and maintain a planned system that supports consistent work practices and optimized performance and safety. Task completion times can be tracked automatically to establish baselines and calculate future requirements. Real time reporting and intelligent analytics are among the many capabilities of this feature-rich platform that directly support these objectives while reducing offline data collection and analysis.