How to plan preventive maintenance?

Setting up a preventive maintenance strategy and plan

Preventive maintenance allows you to anticipate breakdowns so that you are not taken by surprise in the event of a fault. There are several advantages to preventive maintenance: it extends the life of equipment, avoids downtime as much as possible (which is detrimental to your profitability), and the maintenance of quality customer service.

In addition, preventive maintenance operations are much shorter than corrective maintenance operations, which will save you resources in terms of time spent.

When preparing your preventive maintenance plan, you will need to take into account the characteristics of your facilities, your equipment, and your maintenance needs. Curative maintenance alone can put a company at risk by keeping equipment down for some time.

You can set up a preventive maintenance strategy in order to monitor your regulatory controls, carry out recurring maintenance actions or implement programmed interventions following checks on the natural wear and tear of your equipment.

We will study the three cases mentioned above in order to carry out your successful preventive maintenance plan.

1 - Regulatory inspections

Numerous regulatory controls are required, regardless of the type of business, whether they relate to the premises of an establishment open to the public (ERP) or to the equipment itself. You must carry out these controls at intervals defined by the legislator to remain in compliance with the regulations.

In order to ensure that these checks are fulfilled on time, you can define a panel of scheduled tasks using monitoring software such as Urbest.

This will enable you to schedule these checks and subsequently schedule and monitor the resulting maintenance tasks.
Good management of these operations will allow you to significantly increase your quality of service within the framework of an ERP and avoid any problems linked to the safety of your establishment and/or your equipment.

Thanks to urbest's checklist of predefined tasks for regulatory verifications, you will be able to avoid forgetting anything and set up a preventive maintenance plan following these verifications.

2 - Recurring actions

Regardless of your type of activity, you will have to deal with recurrent maintenance tasks.
These are an integral part of your preventive maintenance plan that you must prepare for in order to deal with them within a reasonable time.

These recurrent actions could be, for example, roof cleaning, ventilation cleaning, or grease trap maintenance.In order to define them, you need to prepare the recurrence of these interventions, the number of interventions required, the instructions of the task to be carried out, or the duration of the intervention.

All these data will allow you to draw up a quality preventive maintenance plan and above all save time from one year to the next. This knowledge will be stored and shared easily with a new colleague.

The monitoring of service providers can also be done by means of collaborative scheduled tasks. By combining the concept of a calendar, collaborative discussion, and intervention, it is possible to better share tasks even beyond your scope of intervention.

3 - Natural wear and tear of equipment

Intervention planning can also be useful in the context of the natural wear and tear of your equipment.Equipment failure can cost much more than just replacing the part if you take into account the cost of immobilising the equipment or the cost of interrupting service.

From the manufacturers' manuals or from personal experience you can find out the life expectancy of the parts in your equipment.

Unlike corrective maintenance, your preventive maintenance plan will need to include the replacement of these parts before they expire so that it does not immobilise the machines or stop your production.

While some Gmao software packages can provide functions dealing directly with equipment replacement, Urbest's planned task method can also help you to plan its intervention and mostly share the information with the right people.

With the help of a collaborative tool, you will be able to define a quality plan that can have an optimised impact on your production and your quality of service. Unlike corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance will enable you to save human and financial resources in the medium term.

Do you have a question about this article or do you need more information? Contact hugo@urbest.io

Download the 10 essentials for a successful maintenance plan here