Designing a preventive maintenance program is a crucial step toward preventing failures, reducing costs, and more. Once an organization has created a preventive maintenance program, there needs to be a plan in place to review and reassess what is working, what isn’t adding value, and what further changes are needed. In this guide, we’ll explain how to build an effective preventive maintenance program and how to optimize it for better results over time.
What Is a Preventive Maintenance Program?
A preventive maintenance program is a structured plan that schedules regular inspections, servicing, and repairs to reduce the likelihood of equipment failure and extend asset life. Preventive maintenance is regular, planned maintenance that’s scheduled according to time or use. For example, a routine preventive maintenance task might be scheduled for the first day of every month, or after a certain number of production cycles.
To balance the risk of failure with the time and costs of maintenance, preventive maintenance programs should be periodically reviewed based on failure history and performance analysis. This is called preventive maintenance optimization. It is a method of continuous improvement, aiming to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of maintenance activities. A successful preventive maintenance program has numerous benefits:
- Increased cost-effectiveness
- Improved reliability
- Increased machine uptime
- Enhanced organizational understanding of risk management
- Better clarity around maintenance tasks
- Focused use of resources
What Should a Preventive Maintenance Program Include?
At its core, a preventive maintenance program is a coordinated system of people, processes, and tools designed to keep equipment running smoothly and prevent unplanned downtime. While every organization has different needs, a strong program typically includes a few key building blocks.
It starts with a clear understanding of your assets — their location, function, and importance to operations. Prioritization plays a major role here; critical assets that impact safety, production, or compliance require more attention than less essential equipment.
Maintenance schedules are the heartbeat of the program. These can be driven by time intervals (like every 30 days) or usage metrics (like every 500 operating hours). What matters most is that tasks are consistent, based on reliable data, and tailored to the needs
of each asset.
Equally important are the procedures and people behind the work. Standardized instructions help ensure tasks are consistently done correctly, while training provides technicians with the knowledge and tools they need to work efficiently and safely.
Finally, a successful preventive maintenance program isn’t static. It includes a system for tracking completed maintenance tasks, reviewing results, and making informed adjustments over time — whether that’s fine-tuning schedules, updating procedures, or retiring tasks that no longer add value.
How to Start a Preventive Maintenance Program in 9 Steps
Wondering how to develop a preventive maintenance program? To avoid an overwhelming situation, you can start small, get some findings and results, and then expand. You don’t need to cover everything all at once. Start with some of the assets most critical to organizational goals. When creating the complete list of preventive maintenance tasks, as well as identifying how often to perform them, consult your maintenance history data and OEM recommendations.
Implementing a pilot program and proving that it can provide some substantial ROI gives you a solid foundation to build upon. Collect feedback from your team to identify what is working well and what isn’t.
Here’s a step-by-step guide when you’re ready to begin:
1. Take inventory of your assets
Start by identifying all the equipment and systems that require maintenance. Record key details such as location, manufacturer, model, serial number, and current condition.
2. Prioritize assets based on criticality
Not all assets carry the same level of risk. Use an asset criticality analysis to determine which equipment has the biggest impact on safety, production, or compliance, and prioritize those for maintenance planning.
3. Gather manufacturer recommendations and maintenance history
Review OEM guidelines and any existing maintenance records to understand what tasks should be performed, how often, and by whom. This creates a strong foundation for
your schedules.
4. Define preventive maintenance tasks
For each critical asset, create a list of specific PM tasks, such as inspections, lubrication, filter replacements, or part checks, and define clear instructions for completing them.
5. Create maintenance schedules
Set up time-based or usage-based intervals for each task. Consider environmental conditions, asset age, and failure history when determining frequency.
6. Assign responsibilities and train your team
Designate who will carry out each task and ensure they have the necessary tools, training, and safety procedures. Standardizing this step helps ensure consistency and reliability.
7. Choose a system for tracking and scheduling
Whether you use spreadsheets or a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), your tracking method should support work orders, scheduling, documentation, and reporting.
8. Start small and scale
Pilot the program on a few critical assets first. This allows you to test your process, adjust as necessary, and build team buy-in before rolling out across the facility.
9. Review and improve over time
Monitor performance metrics, technician feedback, and equipment data to identify what’s working and what needs adjustment. A successful PM program evolves with your
business needs.
Optimizing Preventive Maintenance Program Schedules
There are three popular approaches for optimizing preventive maintenance schedules:
- Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM)
- Failure reporting, analysis, and corrective action system (FRACAS)
- Judgment-based approach
Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)
This approach aims to ensure systems continue to do what is required for operations. The goal is to implement a unique maintenance schedule for each critical asset within a facility or organization. In his book RCM2, the late John Moubray characterized reliability-centered maintenance as a process to establish safe minimum levels of maintenance.
According to ReliabilityWeb.com, a program must meet these four basic principles in order to be recognized as reliability-centered maintenance:
- The program is scoped and structured to preserve system function
- It identifies how functions are defeated (failure modes)
- It addresses failure modes by importance
- For important failure modes, it defines applicable maintenance task candidates and selects the most effective one
In addition, there are four phases of an RCM project, according to ReliabilityWeb:
- Decision: Justification and planning based on need, readiness, and desired outcomes
- Analysis: Conduct the RCM study in a way that provides a high-quality output
- Implementation: Act on the study’s recommendations to update asset and maintenance systems, procedures, and design improvements
- Benefits: Measure improvements and identify opportunities for
additional improvements
Image courtesy of ReliabilityWeb.com
This approach is a multi-faceted process that requires time, effort, and buy-in from your maintenance team, leadership, and other stakeholders. Thus, it is best deployed to improve efficiency for large-scale, capital projects or for critical equipment.
Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System (FRACAS)
A failure reporting, analysis, and corrective action system (FRACAS) is a more rapid approach to PM optimization that does not require extensive planning and decision-making to assess a PM program. FRACAS is a system that establishes a procedure for reporting, classifying, analyzing failures, and planning corrective actions in response to common failures. It identifies the root causes and failure analyses to help organizations implement the best solution to prevent or predict the issue from occurring time and time again.
FRACAS consists of:
- Failure Reporting: Asset or system failures are formally reported through a Defect Report, Failure Report, or within a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS).
- Analysis: Perform analysis to identify the root cause of failure.
- Corrective Actions: Identify, implement, and verify corrective actions to prevent more repetition of the same failure.
Common outputs from FRACAS include Key Performance Indicators such as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), Mean Time Between Repairs (MTBR), Mean Time To Repair (MTTR), reliability growth, and failure/incidents distribution by type. The FRACAS model provides the information needed to support Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) efforts.
Judgment-Based Approach
This process involves consulting the maintenance team and system engineers to develop a plan based on observing equipment operation and response to the existing preventive maintenance program schedule.
The judgment-based approach is not as data-driven as the other methods and will not produce the same data and indicators of performance. However, in some cases and for some pieces of equipment, the time and effort required to collect and track data are not necessary or justified. Judgment-based preventive maintenance is best for assets that are less critical to production or that are inexpensive to repair or replace.
How a CMMS Can Help a Preventive Maintenance Program
Preventive maintenance scheduling software is a helpful tool for scheduling, tracking, and analyzing your efforts.
Automate Preventive Maintenance Processes and Procedures
A CMMS offers automation tools to help reduce missing scheduled work and equipment failures, making your preventive maintenance program as efficient and streamlined as possible. Preventive Maintenance Task Generation, Preventive Maintenance Scheduling, and Inspections features facilitate continuous improvement and support for your preventive maintenance program.
- Preventive Maintenance Task Generation: Use calendar- and/or meter-based preventive maintenance tasks for all assets. These include detailed descriptions with how-tos, guidelines, and other information vital to performing the work effectively.
- Preventive Maintenance Task Schedules: Coordinate labor resources and parts needed to complete work and automatically generate preventive maintenance tasks based on usage or on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Inspections: Record inspections accurately and generate corrective work orders when equipment inspections fail.
A CMMS completely automates the failure reporting step in the FRACAS method. You can also leverage a CMMS to perform root cause analysis and deploy corrective actions.
Track and Analyze Preventive Maintenance Program Schedules
Both reliability-centered maintenance and FRACAS require considerable tracking and analysis of preventive maintenance processes. With eMaint’s reporting and dashboard tools, organizations can consistently document work order history, failures, costs, and trends. With a few clicks of a mouse, organizations can access the data to perform the analyses that both RCM and FRACAS require.
- Reports: Build reports that can be automatically updated with your organization’s most important KPIs and keep all critical data in one place. You can also automatically generate and email reports to anyone in your organization.
- Dashboards: With your CMMS data, generate dashboards and associated graphs on total downtime by critical asset, MTBF, wrench time percentage, and more. This will help your organization get a better understanding of how equipment is performing and how to improve processes.
eMaint Clients and Process Optimization
Nippon Sheet Glass (NSG) Group is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of glass and glazing systems. Nine ISO/TS 16949 compliant plants across NGS Group’s North American operations use eMaint.
Within the system, NSG Group set up a template to standardize across all locations to effectively look at performance and analyze key metrics, including leading and lagging. Completion rates for preventive maintenance are an NSG Group leading metric because of how it can impact operations.
KPIs are recorded and tracked on a daily basis. The team developed a Metrics Center tab on their Dashboard, which offers live data on preventive maintenane completion rates per Master Asset (Production Line) asset. The team also tracks each location’s performance to develop benchmarks and a scorecard that supports corporate goals of continuous improvement and reduction of waste.
C.B. Fleet Laboratories is a leading manufacturer of personal care and over-the-counter products, specializing in feminine hygiene, gastrointestinal products, and infant care.The team kicked off implementation by interviewing mechanics to collect their insights into daily activities and identifying which aspects of work were the most challenging.
Five key pillars were identified as the focus for revamping processes: people, material management, workload management, basic care and, reliability. The company has reported that nearly every aspect of business is measured and reported to improve accountability, transparency and productivity within the company.
C.B. Fleet’s use of eMaint led to a 50% reduction in reactive maintenance and a 35% decrease in reactive maintenance labor hours.
An effective preventive maintenance program is about performing the right work, at the right frequency, the right way. A few KPI improvements eMaint clients have experienced thanks to leveraging preventive maintenance include:
- 30% reduction in corrective maintenance
- 20% to 80% increase in planned maintenance percentage
- 77% increase in preventive maintenance compliance
Want to learn how eMaint can improve your organization’s preventive maintenance program? Get your free trial started today or click here for pricing.