What Is Preventive Maintenance? Definition, Examples, and Best Practices

Preventive maintenance (PM) is regularly scheduled maintenance designed to optimize asset performance, reduce downtime and unexpected equipment failures, and extend asset life.

What Is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance (PM), also known as preventative maintenance, is a system of routine maintenance tasks designed to lessen the likelihood of failure while extending asset lifespan. These planned maintenance tasks represent a proactive approach to maintenance, where operations revolve around upkeep instead of major repair.

Common Preventive Maintenance Tasks

Typical preventive maintenance activities include:

• Lubricating parts
• Tightening loose components
• Inspecting electrical systems
• Replacing worn parts, such as belts or bearings
• Cleaning HVAC systems, including vents, ducts, and filters
• Testing emergency systems, such as alarms and backups
• Ensuring compliance

Why Is Preventive Maintenance Important?

Preventive maintenance processes matter because they foster a predictable and safe work environment.

A standard maintenance schedule follows a calendar; maintenance and routine inspections are conducted at regular intervals. This reliable cadence helps maintenance personnel become more efficient and effective.

Additionally, PM helps prevent equipment failures. This keeps schedules reliable, reduces downtime, and helps avoid any safety risks associated with unexpected equipment failures.

In short, a preventive maintenance approach (coupled with the right preventive maintenance software) helps ensure continuous operation, optimal performance, and workplace safety.

Types of Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance includes five common types:

1. Usage-based maintenance (UBM) schedules tasks based on intervals of asset use, such as hours of runtime or cycles completed.
2. Time-based maintenance (TBM) utilizes a calendar to schedule routine tasks by day, week, month, or year.
3. Condition-based maintenance (CBM) uses indicators of wear or potential failure to schedule tasks, as determined by technician inspections or sensor data collected by condition monitoring tools.
4. Predictive maintenance (PdM) combines real-time data with historical trends to identify potential failures before they occur.
5. Prescriptive maintenance depends on artificial intelligence (AI) forecasting, which reveals the estimated timing of, and recommended solution for, potential asset failures.

But no single strategy is ideal for every circumstance, and no maintenance operation should rely on just one strategy. Instead, organizations should combine multiple types of preventive maintenance with other reactive and proactive maintenance strategies for the best outcomes.

Preventive Maintenance Examples by Industry

Here are some examples of preventive maintenance within the context of specific industries:

Construction operations can improve workplace safety by completing regular inspections and following a usage-based maintenance schedule for heavy equipment, like pavers, compactors, cranes, and more.

Manufacturing companies can reduce unplanned downtime, costly repairs, and quality control issues with routine cleaning, calibration, and lubrication of production equipment.

Fleet maintenance organizations can avoid breakdowns with usage-based upkeep, such as brake inspections, oil changes, and other routine maintenance based on mileage.

Information technology firms, including data centers, can reduce overheating and power-loss incidents through routine firmware updates and safety checks.

Healthcare organizations should perform maintenance on critical assets, such as defibrillators and MRI machines, at regular usage- and time-based intervals. This ensures optimal performance and compliance as well as staff and patient safety.

Click for more real-world preventive maintenance examples.

How Does Preventive Maintenance Differ From Other Maintenance Strategies?

Here are the key differences that separate PM from other types of maintenance strategies.

Preventive Maintenance vs Reactive Maintenance

Reactive maintenance is a broad descriptor for a wide variety of maintenance strategies that defer maintenance until technicians discover a defect or failure.

But with preventive maintenance, maintenance teams aim to avoid equipment failure through regular inspection and repairs.

Preventive Maintenance vs Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is a subset of reactive maintenance. With this strategy, technicians don't perform maintenance unless parts or equipment require repair or replacement. Deferred maintenance and run-to-failure fall in this category.

Preventive maintenance aims to minimize corrective maintenance through regular upkeep, repair, and replacement of equipment and parts before they fail.

Preventive Maintenance vs Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance (PdM) is a type of preventive maintenance focused on real-time and historical data analysis. With predictive maintenance, teams use data to anticipate equipment failure and take appropriate action to prevent it from occurring.

So, PM encompasses all maintenance strategies designed to prevent failure before it occurs — and PdM is one of those strategies.

How and When Do I Use Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance is an ideal approach for most mission-critical equipment. If potential damage to an asset poses safety risks or significantly impacts operational reliability, a preventive maintenance plan may yield major benefits.

Most assets suitable for preventive maintenance work suffer from frequent wear, have a higher likelihood of failure based on time or usage, and are cost-effective to regularly maintain (as opposed to a reactive maintenance approach).

But how do you determine which assets to place on your preventive maintenance schedule? Here are the essential questions to help you decide:

• Which assets have the largest impact on production?
• In the event of defects or failure, which assets pose the biggest safety risks?
• Does my maintenance team have the skills and capacity to perform regular maintenance on this asset?
• Which maintenance technicians will service this equipment, and how often?
• Do we have the appropriate preventive maintenance software, such as a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), to manage and allocate the work?

Preventive Maintenance Benefits and Challenges

The Body of Knowledge created by the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP) includes preventive maintenance as an essential component of its “Equipment Reliability” pillar. The SMRP considers effective understanding and implementation of PM practices to be a key measure of maintenance proficiency.

Preventive maintenance programs have many benefits, but they also pose challenges. It’s important to consider both when making a decision.

Benefits

• Improved asset lifespan: By preventing major failures, regularly scheduled inspections and maintenance can extend equipment lifespans by 20-30%.
• Reduced maintenance costs: While upfront costs can increase, operations with solid PM strategies can yield 20% cost savings. That's because emergency repairs are more intensive and costly compared to regular upkeep. PM yields 150% higher ROI compared to more reactive approaches.
• Simplified resource planning: After an initial PM adjustment period, allocating your team's time and resources becomes much easier. Fewer emergencies mean more reliable schedules and predictable inventory needs.
• Increased uptime and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): Compared to equipment downtime from unexpected breakdowns, scheduled PM downtime may lead to 25% less downtime overall. Plus, it's easy to plan PM tasks around your production schedules, reducing downtime during production hours.

Challenges

• Risk of excessive maintenance: Overreliance on preventive maintenance schedules can lead to excess labor and parts usage. For example, time-based schedules may lead you to replace parts before they show signs of wear.
• Upfront maintenance costs: Preventive maintenance can be time-consuming; you may need to hire new technicians to meet demand for all tasks. Plus, you may need to order more inventory, including spare parts and test tools.
• Resource allocation difficulties: Assigning more techs to PM tasks may mean there are fewer techs available for corrective actions, including emergency repairs.
• Adjustment to scheduled downtime: While preventive maintenance can reduce unexpected downtime, it increases planned downtime — which still affects operational efficiency.

7 Best Practices To Build a Preventive Maintenance Program

Ready to implement PM strategies in your organization? Here's how to start:

1. Take inventory of every asset in your facility. Document all equipment details to fully understand your maintenance needs.
2. Perform an asset criticality assessment to grade each piece of equipment based on its repair costs, compliance needs, safety, and impact on production.
3. Review original equipment manufacturer (OEM) guidelines for all assets. Later, you'll use these recommendations to build your complete PM schedule.
4. Determine the appropriate types of preventive maintenance for each asset, balancing OEM recommendations with your criticality assessment results. Across preventive maintenance strategies, time, usage, and condition are the most common triggers for determining maintenance needs.
5. Create maintenance schedules based on your preferred PM approach for each asset. Organize time-based schedules by day, week, month, and year; develop more fluid, as-needed schedules for usage- and condition-based approaches. Designate which technicians will perform each task.
6. Develop and use preventive maintenance checklists to document all necessary tasks. PM checklistsshould include descriptions of work, along with required parts and tools.
7. Adopt a reliable CMMS to generate work orders, manage assets and schedules, track progress, run reports, and analyze data.

How To Choose the Right Systems and Software for Preventive Maintenance

To implement and scale your PM strategy, you need a reliable system to manage everything.

With a CMMS, you can automatically build PM schedules, generate work orders, and assign tasks to technicians. Technicians can complete tasks and upload documentation while you track status updates. Plus, advanced reporting and analytics capabilities help you spot gaps and identify areas for improvement.

Hoyt Archery used eMaint CMMS to improve PM compliance by 77% while reducing equipment downtime by 40%. Read the case study.

Curious about what the right CMMS can do for you? Click to start your free demo of eMaint CMMS.