Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
Preventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: preventative maintenance, planned maintenance, PM.
Reactive maintenance fixes things after they break. It is not automatically wrong — for cheap, non-critical, quickly replaced equipment it is the rational choice, and pretending otherwise leads to elaborate schedules for items nobody misses.
Preventive maintenance services on a schedule, whether or not anything looks wrong. It trades some unnecessary servicing for many fewer surprise failures.
Predictive maintenance uses condition monitoring — vibration, temperature, hours, error counts — to service when the equipment indicates need. It is the most efficient and the most demanding, since it requires instrumentation and data nobody has by accident.
Most operations should run a mix, sorted by what a failure actually costs.
Start with the manufacturer's schedule, then adjust to your own evidence. Manufacturer intervals assume typical use in typical conditions; equipment run hard, run in dust, or run by many different people usually needs shorter ones.
Where usage varies a lot between items, schedule by usage rather than by date. Servicing two identical machines annually when one does five times the work of the other over-services one and under-services the other.
Almost never at the planning stage. Schedules are easy to write and satisfying to produce. They fail on follow-through: nothing reminds the right person at the right time, so due work slides; nothing records what was actually done, so nobody can tell whether the schedule is being kept; and the resulting history is too patchy to justify the programme when its cost is questioned.
A modest schedule that is genuinely completed and recorded beats a thorough one that exists mainly as a document.
Without a schedule that reminds someone and records what was done, maintenance becomes reactive by default — and unplanned failure is both more expensive and worse timed than planned servicing.
Itefy schedules recurring maintenance per item, notifies the responsible user when it is due, and keeps completed work with costs in the item's service history. Read more.
No. For cheap, non-critical equipment that is quick to replace, reactive maintenance is often the rational choice. Sort equipment by what a failure actually costs and spend the planning effort where that number is large.
Usage, wherever usage varies meaningfully between items. Calendar schedules over-service lightly used equipment and under-service the hard-working item that most needs attention.
An equipment condition report is a dated record of the physical and working state of a specific item, used to track deterioration and settle damage questions.
DefinitionUtilisation rate is the share of available time that a piece of equipment is actually in use, expressed as a percentage.
DefinitionEquipment depreciation is the accounting method for spreading an item's cost across the years it is expected to be useful, rather than expensing it all at purchase.
DefinitionAsset lifecycle management is the practice of managing equipment deliberately at every stage — from specifying and buying it through use and maintenance to disposal.
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