Preventive maintenance is an essential part of any business, as it helps to ensure that equipment and machinery are running smoothly and efficiently. There are four main types of preventive maintenance: time-based maintenance, usage-based maintenance, predictive maintenance, and prescriptive maintenance. Each type has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it is important to understand them in order to make the best decision for your business. Time-based maintenance is a strategy that involves scheduling regular maintenance tasks at predetermined intervals.
This type of preventive maintenance is suitable for short-term assets such as fire extinguishers, damper motors, pumps, etc. An advantage of using this strategy is that it offers better preparation for the next task, as it lets you know all the parts, supplies, and labor needed to get the job completed before its due date. Additionally, less labor is required as the machine or equipment is checked regularly and may still be in good condition or need a slight improvement. Usage-based maintenance involves tracking the usage of certain machinery or equipment every day.
This type of preventive maintenance is especially relevant to manufacturing, food production plants, and the electrical and energy industry. By monitoring usage (i.e. monitors, operating hours, production cycles), businesses can have a better idea of what systems and equipment might need a little extra care. Predictive maintenance relies on sensors to capture information about equipment (i.e.
temperature sensors or vibration sensors). Generally, this type of preventive maintenance is specific to the technology that can activate work orders if a machine or appliance needs an inspection or update. Predictive maintenance involves monitoring the condition of essential machinery to track performance and detect potential defects that could cause a system crash. Prescriptive maintenance uses advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to generate predictions about maintenance and also act accordingly.
This type of preventive maintenance makes recommendations for improving system operations and follows up on its own to produce a work order and oversee the entire process. Fault detection maintenance is carried out to ensure that something, often a protective device of some kind, is still working. Protective devices are those designed to draw attention to a problem, stop a process to prevent further problems, and protect it against accidents. Activating an alarm from time to time would be considered a failure in the search for maintenance. Unfortunately, maintenance professionals often give low priority to maintaining fault detection but it is essential to maintaining a safe environment and sometimes preventing major disasters that occur as a result of multiple failures. Risk-based maintenance is a strategy that aims to reduce mechanical failures by assessing the levels of risk associated with your equipment and then prioritizing maintenance activities accordingly.
The theory behind risk-based maintenance is essentially Pareto's Law which holds that 80 percent of failures are attributable to just 20 percent of your equipment; therefore it makes sense to focus your efforts on those areas. Both the probability of a failure and the consequences of a failure are considered in support of this approach.Condition-based monitoring involves monitoring the condition of equipment or machinery in operation to determine what type of maintenance needs to be performed and when. Signs of decreased performance or imminent failure would indicate that maintenance is necessary to restore the machine to its previous level of performance and reliability. Predictive maintenance is a type of maintenance in which many process parameters obtained from in-line sensors are used to determine if equipment is moving away from stable operating conditions and heading towards failure. Predictive maintenance can be especially relevant for more complex failure modes or failure modes with quite significant consequences due to the costs and complexity involved. When done correctly, preventive maintenance can optimize both the performance of assets and their financial resources.
However, if reactive maintenance continues to be performed at a high frequency even though you are investing in preventive maintenance you will not see any real benefits.
