Getting Started: Step-by-Step Preventive Maintenance Plan

 

Step #1: Decide Which Assets Go First On The PM Schedule

If this is your first time making a preventive maintenance plan, we suggest that you start by scheduling preventive maintenance on your most critical assets.

It’s going to be easier to convince higher-ups and see quick results if you start with one or two assets to prove value. Additionally, this will give you and your team some breathing room to adjust and transition into a proactive maintenance mindset and workflow.

When trying to determine which assets to select for your preventive maintenance plan, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Which machines are most important to production/organizational success?
2. Is regular maintenance required for this piece of equipment?
3. Are the repair and replacement costs high?

You’ll want to select machines that require regular maintenance and have higher replacement/repair costs as this will provide your company with the greatest returns. You’ll also want to steer clear of assets that are reaching the end of their rope – so don’t pick equipment that will need to be replaced soon.

Step #2: Gather All The Necessary Info

Once you’ve selected the machines to work with, put together a preventative maintenance plan that highlights the return on investment. To do this, you’ll need to calculate the dollar amount that you would save annually for each asset.

Now that you’ve decided which assets you want on your preventive maintenance plan, you need a list of specific maintenance tasks that will be performed on them, as well as the frequency of those tasks.

Here is a list of different sources you can use to gather necessary info:

1) Look at the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) recommendations

Equipment manufacturers have a plethora of statistical data from in-house testing and field tests done by customers. The manuals they provide often contain schedules for necessary maintenance, the usage of critical spare parts, and basic maintenance work instructions.



2) Use the data from your maintenance history

Even if you are not using a CMMS right now, you will hopefully have some sort of maintenance log available. Look at what kind of failures did the asset you put on your PM plan experienced in the past (and how often).

From that, you can roughly extrapolate what kind of preventive work you can schedule (and how often) to prevent some of those failures in the future.

Here is an example of the maintenance log and how it looks inside Limble:



3) Talk with your maintenance technicians and machine operators

As a maintenance manager, some insights you can only get by talking to the people that are turning the wrench and that are in the contact with the machines daily. More often than not, they will have some information you can’t find in maintenance logs and reports.

For instance, you might find out that one of your technicians had to improvise a solution after a recent breakdown because he didn’t have all the necessary spare parts on hand. While he was able to get the machine running, some components are currently experiencing additional wear and tear. Because of that, you need to schedule regular inspections of those components until those spare parts arrive and the problem is resolved.

After you’re done gathering the data, you will have a list that could look something like this:



As you can see from the picture above, it’s usually not a bad idea to also include additional notes for certain tasks so a technician knows exactly what he needs to do. Here is another resource for Frequency of Preventive Maintenance Inspections.

Step #3: Create The Initial Preventive Maintenance Plan

If everything went according to plan, you now have the list of all the needed preventive maintenance tasks and a general idea of how often you need to perform each of those tasks on a particular asset.

All that is left is to enter the data into your maintenance planning tool (hopefully a CMMS), assign your tasks to the correct people, and add a priority and due date to ensure the whole team is on the same page.

If you want to see an actual example of a preventive maintenance plan, we have one just a few scrolls below.

Step #4: Track & Adjust

One of the traps you need to avoid when implementing preventive maintenance is scheduling too much preventive work and giving too much attention to assets that don’t need it.

The good news is that this challenge is easily solved, especially if you are using a modern CMMS like Limble. You just need to:

1. Log into your CMMS
2. Open asset cards for the assets that are on your PM plan
3. Open asset report

What you should concentrate on is how much preventive work has been done on an asset and how many failures (if any) did it experience since you’ve placed it onto a PM plan.

The rest is quite simple.

Asset didn’t experience even a single breakdown? Maybe it could still operate without failures with less preventive work spent on it.

Asset experiences regular failures despite regular check-ups and other preventive measures?
It is possible to schedule even more preventive work on it after you investigate what those breakdowns were and what caused them.

You won’t know for sure until you test it.

Lastly, you have to be aware that your initial PM schedule will never be perfect – and that is perfectly fine.

As long as you’re ready to adjust your preventive maintenance plan according to the maintenance logs and feedback you get from your technicians, you have nothing to worry about.

Step #5: Expand Your Preventive Maintenance Program To All Assets

The goal of your initial preventive maintenance plan was to:

1. Prove that preventive maintenance can provide significant ROI<
2. Give yourself and your technicians a transition period to get used to the changes in the workflow and to switch to a proactive mindset

If you were able to do both of these things, it means you’ll be able to get a green light from your superiors to continue working on your preventive maintenance strategy.

If that is indeed the case, then it is time to repeat these steps and expand your preventive maintenance program to the rest of your assets that will benefit from it.