Development and implementation of preventive maintenance programs

• Asset breakdown. All machines and installations that will be subject to the preventive maintenance plan must be located. In factories with many machines or with several units of the same model, it is useful to assign a unique code to each one. This makes it easier to identify them.
• Procedures. Each preventive procedure must be defined: work to be done, necessary materials and tools, specific security measures, etc. It is about having all the relevant information to speed up the work and avoid mistakes.
• Actions planning. It is necessary to plan the preventive actions, to define how they are going to be repeated, and when will be the next operation. Thus the planning becomes much simpler. They can be organized following several indicators:

• • Natural time, repeating the action when a certain time has elapsed since the last action. It is used when it is difficult to calculate wear or measure other parameters.
  • Working time, counting the working hours of the machine. It is necessary that it has a built-in hour meter. With this system the counted time is more related to the wear of the machine.
  • Work cycles, some machines count the work cycles (in the case of a saw the number of cuts, in a packaging machine the amount of containers produced, etc.). Using this factor is preferable to the previous ones.
  • Traveled distance, in vehicles it is easier to use the odometer to calculate the next preventive action.

There is other information that is usually included in preventive maintenance plans, depending on the needs of the company. In practice, usually depends on the size of the company itself, because if it is a modest business, controlling too much data has a cost that is not proportional to the results obtained, while, in the case of a large industry, any information that helps make better decisions has great benefits. Some complementary options are economic analysis, personnel management, spare parts management, etc.