What is Preventive Maintenance? What Benefits Does PM Offer? (2024)

Preventive maintenance refers to regular, routine maintenance to help keep equipment up and running, preventing any unplanned downtime and expensive costs from unanticipated equipment failure. It requires careful planning and scheduling of maintenance on equipment before there is an actual problem as well as keeping accurate records of past inspections and servicing reports. Preventive management can be very complex, especially for companies with a lot of equipment. For this reason, many companies rely onpreventive maintenance softwareto help organize and carry out all their preventive maintenance needs.

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What Does Preventive Maintenance Include?

Preventive maintenance involves the systematic inspection of equipment where potential problems are detected and corrected in order to prevent equipment failure before it happens. In practice, a preventive maintenance schedule may include things such as cleaning, lubrication, oil changes, adjustments, repairs, inspecting and replacing parts, and partial or complete overhauls that are regularly scheduled.

The exact preventive maintenance required will vary based on operation and type of equipment. Recommended standards of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) are used to help determine the type of inspections and maintenance needed and how often they should be performed. ANSI helps ensure the health and safety of consumers by creating and overseeing the use of thousands of guidelines and norms for nearly every industry, and ANSI standards can be used like a preventive maintenance checklist to define requirements and instructions for maintaining equipment.

Preventive maintenance includes much more than simply performing routine maintenance on equipment. It also involves maintaining accurate records of every inspection and servicing, as well as knowing the lifespan of each part to understand the replacement frequency. These records can help maintenance technicians anticipate the appropriate time to change parts and can also help diagnose problems when they occur. Preventive maintenance software helps collect and organize this information so it is readily available to maintenance technicians.

What Are the Benefits of Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance offers companies a number of important benefits including

• Prolonged life of company equipment
• Less unplanned downtime caused by equipment failure
• Less unnecessary maintenance and inspections
• Fewer errors in day-to-day operations
• Improved reliability of equipment
• Fewer expensive repairs caused by unexpected equipment failure that must be fixed quickly
• Reduced risk of injury

Ideally, a preventive maintenance schedule will prevent all equipment failure before it occurs. It will save time, reduce costs, and keep an operation running efficiently and productively.

How Can Preventive Maintenance Software Help?

Many companies choose preventive maintenance software to coordinate all their preventive maintenance tasks because it simplifies what is otherwise a complex process. Preventive maintenance software stores a company’s maintenance data on a computer (or in the cloud) to easily keep track of all inspections, repairs and replacements. With all data conveniently stored in one place, preventive maintenance software can be used to effectively managework orders,purchase orders,inventoryand maintenance records. Preventive maintenance software even prioritizes maintenance tasks and gathers information a technician needs to perform maintenance work.

Preventive maintenance software offers a number of key benefits. It helps manage all maintenance tasks (and the records of those tasks) so maintenance operations will run smoothly. It can also save on maintenance costs because the system can plan and prioritize maintenance tasks based on operations, therefore minimizing the disruption to the work schedule when maintenance is performed. Finally, preventive maintenance software takes the burden of administrative duties off technicians’ shoulders so they can better focus on their job.

Preventive maintenance is designed to keep equipment running and operations productive. By staying on top of maintenance tasks, maintenance professionals can prevent unplanned downtime that in turn saves a company time and money. The coordination of a preventive maintenance schedule can be very complex, but the use of preventive maintenance software simplifies the process, making preventive maintenance attainable for any business wanting to improve their overall maintenance operations.

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