Unplanned downtime costs the biggest global companies an estimated $1.4 trillion annually. The more sophisticated your business systems are, the more complex and potentially expensive repairs become. The answer? Stopping downtime before it occurs.
Anticipating and preventing downtime is often more cost-effective than relying on reactive maintenance practices and eating the cost of surprise asset failures. Preventive and predictive maintenance both involve regular system checks to reduce downtime and improve reliability. The question is, which one is right for your business? Let’s break it down:
What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance involves scheduling regular maintenance activities to prevent assets from falling into disrepair or breaking down. It’s like a regular check-up by your doctor. Investing in preventive maintenance means having an expert thoroughly examine company assets while in good working condition. This is to pre-empt technical issues or reduce the likelihood of future breakdowns.
Maintenance work is performed to prevent safety issues and production shutdowns. Preventive maintenance involves careful planning, record-keeping, and data analysis to boost operational performance, reduce costs, and simplify labor and resource planning.
You might schedule technicians to perform maintenance based on time or usage intervals for your equipment. For example, a technician might visit every six months, or after the equipment has been used for several thousand hours. Studying asset health data and work order history can help you create a successful maintenance routine.
Paying for technical checks and replacing parts without failure may seem inefficient. But you need to consider the cost-to-loss ratio of maintaining asset function versus the returns on the investment of maintaining uptime. Any service downtime can be financially and reputationally damaging.
What is Predictive Maintenance?
Predictive maintenance is a data-driven strategy powered by real-time monitoring tools that detect potential equipment failures. Although predictive and preventive maintenance approaches are similar, the former utilizes sensors, algorithms, and machine learning to monitor performance and predict issues in real time.
Various techniques can be used to predict problems, from monitoring ultrasonic acoustics to fluctuating temperature, unusual vibrations, or the behavior of fluids within machinery. For example, a spike in temperature could signal a problem or changes in sound that aren’t detectable by the human ear could serve as an early warning system.
Predictive maintenance software uses sensors to monitor assets, set alarms, and accurately see failures coming. If preventive maintenance is a regular check-up by your doctor, then predictive maintenance is the smart watch that tells you when your heart rate drops and prompts you to exercise.
Preventive vs. Predictive Maintenance: Key Differences
While preventive and predictive maintenance both aim to stop problems before they occur, these approaches have key differences.
Preventive maintenance is more labor-intensive because it involves careful planning, record-keeping, and data analysis. Studying asset health data and work order history can help organizations create a successful maintenance routine. Workload, schedules, and notifications can be managed by programs such as computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) software. Some preventive work may be inefficient because it’s not yet essential.
Predictive maintenance means work is only performed when assets are at risk of failure, because systems are constantly monitored for irregularities. Businesses save on unnecessary labor and material costs when assets consistently run smoothly. The flipside of this efficiency is the accompanying costs and staff training. Comparing the initial costs against long-term savings is key.
Can Preventive and Predictive Maintenance Work Together?
Preventive and predictive approaches can go hand in hand. During preventive maintenance, if a technician discovers a piece of equipment isn’t working as effectively as it should or is under unusual stress, they might trigger a preventive maintenance protocol to closely monitor the situation. Leveraging digital tools, like a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), is highly effective for implementing preventive and predictive maintenance strategies.
Where human safety or widespread impact are factors in sustained equipment runtime, predictive maintenance is increasingly important. For example, the oil and gas industry adopted predictive techniques early to lower the likelihood of environmental disasters. Other industries, from food distribution to shipping, are also lowering safety risks with preventive and predictive maintenance programs.
Choosing the Right Maintenance Strategy
Preventive or predictive? The answer depends on your specific needs and the value of preventing downtime. If there’s a public health or environmental risk associated with your equipment failing, you can never be “too careful”.
Strategize based on your in-house technical capability, the available budget, and the short-term impact of an unforeseen shutdown on your organization.