Preventive Maintenance Planning Requires a Robust CMMS Solution

If your organization has several complex and expensive pieces of equipment for its operations, chances are that you’ve heard of the phrase “preventive maintenance”. Some call it preventative and others preventive, but they mean the same thing. Preventive maintenance refers to maintenance tasks that are performed regularly on machinery, typically while it’s still operational, to reduce unplanned downtime and costly unexpected equipment breakdowns. Unfortunately, most organizations still focus on corrective maintenance tasks rather than on preventive maintenance. That being said, let’s take a closer look at why organizations should focus on preventive maintenance planning and how CloudApper CMMS can help streamline it.

Preventive maintenance vs. corrective maintenance in a nutshell

Corrective maintenance refers to taking corrective actions, i.e. taking action AFTER a machine has broken down unexpectedly. It basically focuses on fixing broken pieces of equipment or machinery in line with the saying, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”.

However, the fact is that working equipment and machinery will not necessarily stay that way forever. Most pieces of equipment need regular maintenance in order to perform to their full potential, and for this, preventive maintenance planning is required.

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Scheduling regular maintenance helps detect any issues within the equipment before these disrupt business processes, with the benefit of reducing breakdown losses down the line.

That being said, let’s take a look at how organizations can develop effective preventive maintenance planning.

How to develop preventive maintenance planning with CloudApper CMMS

Gather all the required information

Now, this might be a time investment, but it is extremely important if you want your preventive maintenance to be successful. Plan it out, discuss its importance with the maintenance team as well as the management, set goals and priorities, check feasibility, and so on. Which pieces of equipment require preventive maintenance? Which ones will be left to corrective maintenance? How will the equipment be classified? Look at the historical data – which breakdowns have cost your organization the most? These are the questions that need to be answered in this first step.

Organizing everything using our robust, yet simple, CMMS software can be helpful in keeping all the information in one centralized location – thereby reducing the amount of required paperwork and easing the administrative burden significantly.

Create an equipment inventory

While this might seem similar to the first step, it differs in the level of detail recorded about the assets and pieces of equipment in question.

While the first step identified the assets to be included in preventive maintenance planning, in this step, you will list all assets in all your plants/facilities – classified within categories.

In fact, our robust CMMS app has layout mapping that can help with this, as it indicates where all the assets are located. However, there’s even more – you need to include all available information about your assets in this step – including warranty information, warranty terms, manufacturer’s recommendations, user manuals, previous work orders, and so on.

Once again, all of this information is easily recorded and stored using our CMMS software – and it can all be retrieved in a matter of seconds by authorized users when necessary.

Prioritize assets and assign resources

In this step, you schedule maintenance tasks for those assets most critical to your organization. For instance, a generator is one of the most important pieces of equipment in any given organization – without it, all processes would be hampered. Choose the most critical pieces of equipment and assign resources from the maintenance team.

Fortunately, all of this is done easily using CloudApper’s CMMS solution – right you’re your smartphone! Workers can even update the status for work orders, provide pictures of assets, and much more, using their smartphones.

Review the results and work on improving them

Keep in mind that this is more of an experimental phase if you’re doing preventive maintenance for the first time. You might need to tweak maintenance schedules, modify frequencies of tasks, and make other changes before you achieve the desired results. After conducting preventive maintenance, see which assets require it, whether any assets that require it were missed in the initial steps, which assets are providing satisfactory results with corrective maintenance, and so on.

However, after developing an optimized preventive maintenance routine, it will be evident how beneficial it is.

CloudApper CMMS can help you with preventive maintenance – and more!

Built over CloudApper’s no-code application development platform, CMMS ensures simplified maintenance management, streamlined asset repair, and real-time visibility. Reducing machine downtime, assigning resources to tasks, and monitoring technician progress have never been easier! Contact us now and learn how CloudApper CMMS can transform equipment maintenance management for your organization – no credit card required!