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Preventive Maintenance

Achieve higher reliability with less maintenance

 

Why do we implement
Preventive Maintenance?

Most people would answer ‘to prevent failures’.

Anyone who is up to speed with modern preventive maintenance principles would rephrase that to ‘we maintain equipment to prevent unacceptable failure consequences’.

And they would be right.

Some failures we can accept, because the consequence of the failure is not significant. In other cases, we might go out of our way to prevent a failure.

The problem is, in most cases, preventive maintenance plans and programs don’t achieve this objective. Typically, we spend a lot of effort on preventive maintenance tasks and still experience unacceptable failures.

And that’s because most preventive maintenance programs out there don’t apply the principles of modern preventive maintenance.

Reliability Academy logo displayed on course objective slide—online training for maintenance and reliability professionals

Poor preventive maintenance programs waste your time and money!
They drive you towards a reactive firefighting culture.

The problem with our preventive maintenance programs is that most of them were never developed properly, to begin with.

As John Moubray, the father of RCM II, pointed out in his book Reliability-Centered Maintenance, typically between 40%–60% of the PM tasks in a preventive maintenance program add little value.

Some of the most common problems are:

 

Tasks are duplicated.

 

Tasks are done too frequently or not frequent enough.

 

Tasks are not effective at addressing the failure mode.

 

Too many fixed-time, intrusive overhaul tasks that would be more effective, less costly, and less disruptive to production if they were condition-based.

 

Lack of using existing failure data and experience to set good task frequencies.

The result is that we waste money and time doing preventive maintenance tasks that do not add value. But far worse are the many preventable high-impact failures that occur, ultimately resulting in a reactive plant maintenance cycle.

Rail freight terminal with container handlers and stacked cargo—representing logistics and transport sector in Reliability Academy’s maintenance training programmes

Online training courses that teach your team
how to develop & improve Preventive Maintenance programs

Developing & Improving Preventive
Maintenance Programs

Large commercial aircraft undergoing preventive maintenance—hero image for Reliability Academy training on aviation and asset reliability

Learn how to develop or improve your Preventive Maintenance program using the principles of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) so you can achieve higher reliability with less maintenance.

We offer a suite of courses on Preventive Maintenance tailored to hands-on practitioners (PM100), maintenance and reliability engineers, managers (PM300), and frontline staff like Operators and Technicians (PM400).

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Less maintenance and higher reliability
is possible with a good Preventive Maintenance program

9 Principles of modern preventive maintenance

  Erik Hupjé – 15 min read
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The principles of modern preventive maintenance have been around for a good 40 years and are well documented in many industry books and other resources. Yet, most organisations and maintenance teams still don’t seem to really know and understand these principles. Let alone how to apply them in practice. In this article I will discuss each of these principles in detail and give you some practical tips on how to check if your PM program is up to scratch.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—symbolising systems thinking and human-centred design in Reliability Academy’s maintenance and reliability training approach
Industrial technician using laptop for equipment diagnostics in a processing plant—illustrating digital tools and reliability practices taught by Reliability Academy

Why the FMEA is my equipment not reliable?

 

Erik Hupjé – 15 min read

 

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A Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is often one of the first steps you would undertake to analyse and improve the reliability of a system or piece of equipment.

During an FMEA, you break the selected equipment down into systems, subsystems, assemblies, and components and determine how these could fail.

You analyse why the failure would happen and what the consequence would be. The analysis is completed by assigning preventive or corrective actions to improve reliability.

In this detailed article, I talk about how you can use FMEAs to improve your plant’s reliability and preventive maintenance strategy.

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How to improve your preventive maintenance program

  Erik Hupjé – 15 min read
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Few organisations have effective preventive maintenance programs. Most preventive maintenance programs and tasks are wasteful or ineffective. There are many companies out there that can improve your PM plan for you. But it’s so much better to do it yourself — it’s more cost-effective, creates ownership, and builds capability.

Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide to optimise your PM program. It’s simple, cheap, and effective. No need for external consultants or expensive software.

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Two maintenance technicians inspecting industrial equipment—representing hands-on training and practical reliability skills taught by Reliability Academy

A collection of short, to-the-point and practical posts on all aspects of maintenance & reliability.

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Road to Reliability™ Framework™

We believe in your people and empowering them to drive maintenance improvement in your business.

 
Cover of the Road to Reliability Framework eBook—free downloadable guide from Reliability Academy outlining a 4-step approach to reduce unplanned downtime by 90%