A carefully considered preventive maintenance program can support machinery operation, production efficiency, product quality, equipment life and uptime. Preventive maintenance focuses on performing planned inspections and maintenance tasks at defined intervals based on factors such as time, operating hours, production cycles, and equipment requirements.
An effective strategy goes beyond creating a maintenance schedule. Manufacturers also need to consider asset criticality, equipment history, failure modes, available maintenance resources, and production requirements. Below are 10 preventive maintenance tips that can help you develop or refine an approach suited to your facility and equipment.
The most successful preventive maintenance procedures take a multipronged approach to address potential machinery quality and performance issues before they even occur. Below, you’ll find 10 preventive maintenance tips that can help you tailor a plan to avoid unplanned downtime caused by a machine breakdown.
1. Assess the current state
Before starting any new maintenance plan, it’s always a good idea to conduct a baseline assessment of your facility and equipment. This will provide a big-picture view of your facility that will help guide your actions and decisions. Consider the number, age and types of machines, the OEMs of your machinery, the overall production chain within your facility, the level of automation and any notable historical maintenance issues—either one-time or recurring.
Once you’ve taken the big picture into account, think about the strengths and weaknesses of your facility’s current state and decide where you’d like to focus on improving maintenance and performance.
Include asset criticality in this assessment. Not every machine requires the same level of maintenance attention. Consider what would happen to safety, production and product quality if an individual asset became unavailable. Also consider whether redundant equipment is available, how long repairs might take and whether replacement parts are readily accessible.
Equipment age alone does not determine criticality. A relatively new machine that supports a production bottleneck may require more attention than an older asset that has little effect on overall production. Categorizing equipment by criticality can help maintenance teams decide where limited labor, parts and monitoring resources should be concentrated.
2. Review manufacturer specs
Once you’ve assessed your facility and machinery, it’s time to start doing research. Manufacturer documentation and specs can help you identify recommended maintenance practices for your machinery, which can become an important part of the plan you develop.
Use OEM recommendations as a starting point, then compare them with the conditions in which the equipment actually operates. Maintenance requirements can vary because operating hours, load, temperature, contamination, vibration, humidity, and production demands vary from facility to facility.
For example, a component operating continuously in a dusty environment may require different inspection or maintenance intervals from the same component operating intermittently in a cleaner environment. Maintenance history and equipment condition data can provide additional context when determining whether an existing preventive maintenance interval remains appropriate.
3. Documentation is key
Documentation is an important component of any good maintenance plan. In general, you’ll want to document as much as you can, including the current state of your facility, your newly created maintenance plan and the actions you take in pursuit of that plan.
Standardize what technicians document when completing preventive maintenance. Depending on the asset and task, a preventive maintenance work order might identify the equipment, procedure, required tools, replacement parts, safety requirements, inspection points, measurements or tolerances, and estimated labor requirements.
Technician observations are also valuable. Recording measurements, component condition and follow-up recommendations provides more information than simply marking a work order complete. Standard failure codes and consistent terminology can make maintenance histories easier to analyze.
A CMMS can provide a central location for these records. Over time, maintenance teams can review work-order history to identify repeated problems, compare planned labor with actual labor and evaluate whether individual preventive maintenance tasks are providing useful information.
4. Train and retrain
Your preventive maintenance plan won’t go anywhere without your employees. It’s essential that they’re able to be active, effective participants in your facility’s preventive maintenance plan. Give them the tools to do so by creating a dedicated training program to communicate established preventive maintenance practices. Retraining should occur whenever new practices are enacted and at appropriate intervals.
Training should explain both how to perform a preventive maintenance task and what the technician should evaluate while performing it. Depending on the equipment, this may include lubrication procedures, torque requirements, alignment tolerances, inspection standards, measurement procedures, and CMMS documentation.
Standard work instructions can support more consistent execution. If different technicians perform the same preventive maintenance in substantially different ways, comparing results and identifying equipment trends becomes more difficult. Update training when equipment, procedures or technologies change.
5. Pursue buy-in
Preventive maintenance sometimes has a bad reputation among facility owners and employees. It can be seen as a practice that lowers productivity, increases unnecessary downtime and creates extra work.
Explain why individual preventive maintenance activities are being performed and how they relate to equipment requirements. Employees may be more likely to provide useful feedback when they understand the purpose of a task rather than viewing preventive maintenance as a checklist that simply needs to be completed.
Production personnel can also provide useful information because they interact with equipment during normal operation. Changes in noise, cycle time, vibration or product quality may provide additional context for maintenance teams. Establish a clear process for communicating those observations and determining whether follow-up work is appropriate.
6. Set goals and benchmarks
Working from the big-picture assessment you undertook in the first tip, set measurable goals that reflect the needs of the facility. Choose maintenance metrics that provide useful information about both execution and equipment performance.
Depending on the operation, these may include:
- Preventive maintenance compliance
- Schedule compliance
- Planned versus reactive maintenance work
- Mean time between failures
- Mean time to repair
- Maintenance backlog by priority
- Repeat equipment issues
- Maintenance cost by asset
Avoid evaluating the program according to a single metric. High preventive maintenance compliance, for example, shows that scheduled work is being completed. It does not necessarily demonstrate that each preventive maintenance task is appropriate or effective. Teams should also examine what technicians find during inspections and whether preventive maintenance activities address relevant equipment failure modes.
Backlog also needs context. The objective does not need to be zero backlog. A controlled maintenance backlog can give planners visibility into outstanding work and allow tasks to be prioritized according to equipment criticality, production requirements and available resources. Monitor backlog age and priority so important work remains visible.
7. Take a “before picture”
In pursuit of the above, it can be useful to take a metaphorical snapshot of the initial performance metrics of your facility when you begin your new maintenance plan.
Define this baseline before making major changes. Record metrics such as preventive maintenance compliance, reactive versus planned work, downtime, maintenance labor hours, repeat work orders, and backlog composition. For selected critical assets, baseline information might also include vibration, temperature or other relevant condition indicators.
Using a defined starting point gives the maintenance team something consistent to compare against later. It can also make it easier to determine whether changes in maintenance practices correspond with changes in the metrics being monitored.
8. Track progress
While your goals and benchmarks may be in the form of one-year, three-year and five-year plans, teams should also review results at appropriate intervals.
Establish a reporting cadence that matches the metric. Some measures may be useful weekly, while equipment reliability trends may require several months of data before they provide meaningful insight. Avoid assuming that a short-term improvement or decline was caused by a specific maintenance change without supporting evidence. Production volume, staffing, product mix, and operating conditions can also affect results.
Look for patterns across multiple reporting periods. If the same asset continues generating corrective work despite regularly completed preventive maintenance tasks, review whether the preventive maintenance addresses the relevant failure mode. If inspections consistently generate useful corrective work, that information may support keeping or refining the task.
9. Investigate technology options
Automation and performance data tracking tools are more powerful and commonplace than ever. Even if you aren’t interested in sourcing and installing new sensors and other equipment, you can take steps such as using existing CMMS data in a more deeply analytical way.
Also consider where condition-based or predictive maintenance may complement scheduled preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance generally performs work according to predefined intervals such as calendar time, runtime or production cycles. Predictive maintenance uses information about equipment condition to help teams determine when further inspection or maintenance may be appropriate.
Depending on the asset and failure mode, condition monitoring technologies may include vibration analysis, oil analysis, thermography, ultrasound, or electrical testing. Machine health monitoring can provide ongoing condition information for selected equipment where continuous or frequent monitoring is justified.
Not every preventive maintenance task should be replaced with predictive maintenance. Consider whether the failure produces a measurable warning condition, whether that condition can be monitored economically and what the consequences of failure would be. Choose maintenance tasks based on how components fail rather than applying the same strategy across every asset. Start by identifying significant failure modes for critical equipment.
For components with predictable age- or usage-related wear, a time- or meter-based preventive maintenance task may be appropriate. When a developing fault produces a measurable change in vibration, temperature, lubricant condition, or another parameter, condition monitoring may provide useful information for maintenance planning.
Other failure modes may not provide a practical warning period. In those cases, teams may need to consider alternative approaches such as redesign, redundancy, spare parts availability, or a planned run-to-failure strategy for noncritical components. The appropriate choice depends on the asset and the consequences of the failure.
10. Review and modify as necessary
Your first preventive maintenance plan shouldn’t be your last one. Review the program periodically and use maintenance history, technician observations and condition data to determine whether individual tasks or intervals need attention.
Look for preventive maintenance tasks that consistently identify no actionable conditions, frequently generate corrective work, take substantially longer than planned, duplicate other inspections, or are repeatedly deferred. Each pattern raises a different question about the task.
For example, a preventive maintenance that frequently identifies the same problem may indicate that the task is useful, but it may also suggest that the underlying failure mechanism deserves further investigation. A task that never identifies a problem does not automatically need to be removed or performed less frequently. Consider asset criticality, OEM requirements, failure consequences, and available condition data before changing the interval.
Document significant changes and the reasoning behind them. This creates a record that future planners and technicians can use when reviewing the maintenance strategy again.
Common preventive maintenance mistakes
Avoid treating preventive maintenance as a static checklist. One common mistake is applying the same maintenance strategy to every asset without considering criticality or failure modes. Another is establishing preventive maintenance frequencies once and continuing them indefinitely without reviewing maintenance history or operating conditions.
Data quality can create another challenge. Completing hundreds of work orders provides limited analytical value if technician notes are vague or inconsistent. Define what information should be recorded and make it easy for technicians to document relevant equipment observations.
Also avoid measuring success solely by the volume of preventive work completed. More preventive maintenance is not automatically better preventive maintenance. Unnecessary maintenance can consume labor and production time. In some situations, intrusive maintenance can also introduce defects or disturbances that were not previously present.
Finally, coordinate preventive maintenance with production planning. Maintenance and operations teams may have competing short-term priorities, but shared scheduling provides an opportunity to identify appropriate maintenance windows and understand which work should receive priority.
The objective is to build a preventive maintenance strategy that reflects actual equipment requirements rather than simply increasing the number of scheduled tasks.
With these tips in mind, you’re ready to create or modify a preventive maintenance plan for your operation. Review the strategy as equipment, production requirements and maintenance data change.
If you have questions about preventive maintenance, contact ATS for support.
