How To Start A Preventive Maintenance Plan (Ridiculously Simple Guide)

 If you’re currently relying solely on reactive maintenance, then your company is probably wasting tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars every year due to a lack of a consistent preventive maintenance plan.

The good news is that starting a preventive maintenance program isn’t complicated when you have a clear idea of the steps you need to take.

Not so coincidentally, that is the focus of this article.

If you have a few minutes to spare, we’ll show you how to set up your initial preventive maintenance schedule in just a few simple steps.

After that, we will show you an example of a preventive maintenance plan and discuss how to best present your idea to the upper management to get a green light and proceed with the implementation.

If you are actually looking for a complete transition guide, check out our step-by-step guide: How To Switch From Reactive Maintenance To Preventive Maintenance. It teaches you how to plan the whole transition, implement a preventive maintenance strategy, set up best practices, train your team, and how CMMS enables and supports this transition.

But, before we dive in further, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about the meaning of Corrective and Preventive maintenance.

Corrective Maintenance vs Preventive Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is a maintenance task performed to identify, isolate, and rectify a fault so that the failed equipment, machine, or system can be restored to an operational condition within the tolerances or limits established for in-service operations. Simplified, corrective maintenance focuses on diagnosing and fixing broken assets.

Preventive maintenance (or preventative maintenance) is work that is performed regularly (on a scheduled basis) in order to minimize the chance that a certain piece of equipment will fail and cause costly unscheduled downtime. Preventative maintenance is hence performed while the equipment is still in working condition.

A recent study by Jones Lang LaSalle highlights how a telecommunications company saw a 545% return on investment (ROI) when implementing a preventive maintenance plan.

As good as a 545% return sounds, it can still be tough to get the go-ahead from upper management. To help you accomplish this goal we have put together a simple step-by-step guide on how to convince your manager and make the switch to preventive maintenance.

For now, let’s focus on the thing you came here for – how to create an efficient preventive maintenance plan.