Rather than fixing problems as they happen, which inevitably costs you time and money that you often can’t afford, it’s better to catch problems before they happen. The team at Ohio Diesel can help you come up with a comprehensive preventive maintenance plan that works for you, your truck and trailer, and most importantly your schedule.
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What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance (or preventative maintenance) is maintenance that is regularly performed on a piece of equipment to lessen the likelihood of it failing. It is performed while the equipment is still working so that it does not break down unexpectedly. In terms of the complexity of this maintenance strategy, it falls between reactive (or run-to-failure) maintenance and predictive maintenance.
Types of preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance can be scheduled on a time or usage-based trigger. Let’s look at an example for each.
- Time-based preventive maintenance: A typical example of a time-based preventive maintenance trigger is a regular inspection of a critical piece of equipment that would severely impact production in the event of a breakdown.
- Usage-based preventive maintenance: Usage-based triggers fire after a certain amount of miles, hours, or production cycles. An example of this trigger is a motor vehicle which might be scheduled for service every 10,000 mi.
When is it suitable to use preventive maintenance?
- Have a critical operational function
- Have failure modes that can be prevented (and not increased) with regular maintenance
- Have a likelihood of failure that increases with time or use
Unsuitable preventive maintenance applications
Unsuitable applications for preventive maintenance include those that:
- Have random failures that are unrelated to maintenance (such as circuit boards)
- Do not serve a critical function
Preventive maintenance planning
Planning more preventive maintenance isn’t always better. Doing PMs just to increase your planned maintenance percentage can be costly and lead to post-maintenance breakdowns.
Good preventive maintenance planning is all about fine-tuning the frequency of PMs frequencies. It’s crucial to find the right balance between doing PMs too often (expensive and risky) and not often enough (you’re likely to miss failures between inspections).
One way to hone your preventive maintenance schedule is to follow the PDCA model:
- Plan: Create a baseline for PM frequencies by looking at recommended OEM guidelines, repair histories, criticality, and usage patterns for equipment
- Do: Follow your plan consistently for accurate results
- Check: Look at failure metrics for each asset to determine if your plan is working
- Act: Increase the frequency of PMs if an asset is breaking down between maintenance and reduce the frequency if you are not finding failures between PMs
Following the PDCA model and planning, preventive maintenance without the help of CMMS software can be a huge challenge. Since PMs are triggered after a certain amount of time or use, it’s difficult (if nearly impossible) to track that data manually, especially if you’re dealing with many pieces of critical equipment. Maintenance software allows you to set PMs according to the triggers that are appropriate for each piece of equipment. Once the trigger occurs, a work order will be created.
Maintenance software also allows organizations to gather data on preventive maintenance work orders to report on or optimize those activities and set maintenance KPIs to work towards. AI-powered work order software takes this analysis to the next level by combing through thousands of PMs to find the ones that are leading to breakdowns, delays, and other problems so you can fix them quickly.
Advantages of Preventive Maintenance Service
Advantages compared with less complex strategies: Planning is the biggest advantage of a preventive maintenance program over less complex strategies. Unplanned, reactive maintenance has many overhead costs that can be avoided during the planning process. The cost of unplanned maintenance includes lost production, higher costs for parts and shipping, and time lost responding to emergencies and diagnosing faults while equipment is not working. Unplanned maintenance typically costs three to nine times more than planned maintenance. When maintenance is planned, each of these costs can be reduced. Equipment can be shut down to coincide with production downtime. Before the shutdown, any required parts, supplies, and personnel can be gathered to minimize the time taken for a repair. These measures decrease the total cost of maintenance. Safety is also improved because equipment breaks down less often than in less complex strategies.
PM Service Advantages Compared with Complex Strategies
A preventative maintenance program does not require condition-based monitoring. This eliminates the need (and cost) to conduct and interpret condition monitoring data and act on the results of that interpretation. It also eliminates the need to own and use condition monitoring equipment.
Disadvantages of Preventive Maintenance
Disadvantages compared with less complex strategies: Unlike reactive maintenance, preventive maintenance requires maintenance planning. This requires an investment in time and resources that is not required with less complex maintenance strategies.
Maintenance may occur too often with a preventive maintenance program. Unless, and until the maintenance frequencies are optimized for minimum maintenance, too much or too little preventive maintenance will occur.
Disadvantages compared with more complex strategies: The frequency of preventive maintenance is most likely to be too high. This frequency can be lowered, without sacrificing reliability when condition monitoring and analysis are used. The decrease in maintenance frequency is offset by the additional costs associated with conducting the condition monitoring.
The Bottom Line: The Impact of Preventive Maintenance For Your Truck & Fleet
Preventive maintenance, or PM, is regular, planned maintenance that is scheduled according to usage or time-based triggers. The purpose of PM is to lessen the likelihood of equipment breakdowns. There are many instances in which preventive is the best maintenance strategy to use, and it’s much easier to carry out a PM strategy with the help of maintenance software.
