5 Tips For Better Preventive Maintenance

You can't PM what you don't know you have. Before you begin thinking about preventive maintenance plans and schedules, do an audit of your facilities to make sure all of your assets, mechanicals, and other kinds of maintainable equipment are being tracked. CMMS applications like Q Ware provide a repository for storing asset information and allow you to begin tracking maintenance work and creating those important preventive maintenance schedules. It's a good idea to also take pictures of assets as well as data plates and other helpful visuals so any information you might need can be easily accessed later on.

TIP: Train employees to add and update assets as they perform maintenance repairs. If you need help building assets databases, companies like Q Ware provide on-site services to help catalog facility assets.

Grouping assets that require similar maintenance plans and schedules helps to streamline the preventive maintenance process. Scheduling similar assets on the same recurring intervals makes it easy for your team to focus on specific tasks and they can knock out asset inspections systematically. Besides asset demographic information, assets that require similar procedures, tooling, or expertise are good candidates for asset grouping. Grouping by location can also be a good way to streamline your preventive maintenance.

TIP: If you end up with groups with a large number of assets relative to your teams size, it's good practice to break up that group across many schedules to make the work manageable.

It can be tempting to rely on your intuition to determine how often to perform preventive maintenance tasks and what tasks to include. Q Ware recommends to customers that are starting a preventive maintenance program for the first time to defer to O&M specifications when determining schedules. Doing this gives you a base line to further tweak intervals and the tasks that need to be completed. If you find O&M intervals are too frequent you can always adjust them down, or adjust them up if you're experiencing frequent failures. The same goes for tasks. You can always add or subtract tasks to include in your preventive maintenance work orders. The goal is to end up in the sweet spot between doing too much preventive maintenance and not enough.

TIP: For new assets, read through documentation carefully to make sure your maintenance plans won't void their warranties.

It doesn't do much good to assign 100+ inspections for your team at the beginning of every month. On top of grouping similar assets, chunk them up into staggered schedules when possible to keep work loads manageable. If you have 100 inspections to do in a month, it can help to spread them out into four different schedules that are triggered a week apart. You might have the first 25 triggered at the beginning of week 1, the second 25 triggered at the beginning of week 2, etc. This keeps the work manageable and still keeps to a monthly interval.

TIP: PM work orders should only include a couple of days worth of work. It's important to match your teams' capabilities with the scope of your PM work orders to prevent the need to defer and prioritize work.

To facilitate continued learning, and retain the experience of veteran team members, capture knowledge in how-to material and attach them preventive maintenance schedules. Links to video tutorials, detailed written procedures, and photos all help to pass on knowledge. Newer teams members will get up to speed faster and you'll retain the knowledge that typically goes away when employees retire. 

TIP: Depending on the type of work, there may be videos already available on platforms like YouTube that will work for your team.

Take a look at our eBook about asset grouping and how to set up effective schedules for any size team.