What Is Preventive Maintenance? Everything One Needs To Know

With preventive maintenance, this costly mistake could have been prevented in the early stages!

A furniture manufacturing company faced frequent equipment failures, leading to downtime. Though the company had a maintenance team, the strategy wasn’t ideal and faced acute challenges. Analyzing the situation, the company identified the weakness in the maintenance department, particularly in preventive maintenance practices.

Sometimes, reactive maintenance is not the right strategy; hence, as a solution, the company planned to enhance the efficiency of its preventive maintenance. The result was as expected; the company minimized equipment failures and downtime, improving operational efficiency and reducing maintenance costs. 

These situations highlight the importance of preventive maintenance in industrial or manufacturing operations. 

What is Preventive Maintenance? 

Preventive Maintenance is routine maintenance performed on a fixed schedule to minimize the chance of unplanned breakdowns and increase asset life. Instead of waiting for failure (reactive maintenance), businesses maintain equipment based on time, usage, or condition-based triggers on a schedule.

For example, regularly applying oil to large machines for lubrication is essential. No one waits until a machine begins to seize before taking action; instead, lubrication is done on time to ensure smooth operation. This is a routine task in a typical preventive maintenance schedule.

It is required for businesses to:

• Overcome unexpected breakdowns and minimize operating costs
• Maximizes asset life, delays costly replacements
• Reduces maintenance costs by fixing minor issues before they grow
• Makes the process and operations run smoothly
• Ensures the business complies with the standards of regulation

Prevention saves businesses, time, and money by not letting things break in the first place before they fail.

The Business Impact of Preventive Maintenance

For different stakeholders in an organization, the impact of Preventive Maintenance varies. 

For CEOs & Business Owners:

• Boosts profitability by minimizing costly downtime.
• Enhances brand reputation by ensuring consistent product/service delivery.
• Optimizes asset ROI, delaying capital expenditures on new equipment.

For Maintenance Managers:

• Improves efficiency by reducing emergency repairs.
• Enables better planning with scheduled maintenance and resource allocation.
• Reduces stress; fewer emergency jobs.

For Technicians & Frontline Workers:

• Safer working conditions with fewer equipment malfunctions.
• Less pressure—working proactively instead of firefighting issues.
• Clearer workflows with structured maintenance schedules.

Preventive Maintenance isn’t just about fixing things—it’s about running a smarter, more profitable business.

Preventive Maintenance vs. Other Strategies: What’s the Difference?

There are a few more strategies to ensure higher uptime of a device. While each strategy is relevant to businesses, there are definite stages of adapting them. While the primary concept is reactive, where maintenance efforts are more aligned to repair after an event of issue has already happened. Whereas, the latter ensures avoiding them but differentiates based on the affordability of a company.

Strategy	Approach	Pros	Cons
Reactive Maintenance	Fixing equipment only after it breaks	Low initial cost, easy to implement	High downtime, expensive emergency repairs
Preventive Maintenance	Scheduled maintenance to prevent failures	Reduces downtime, extends asset life	Requires upfront planning and resource allocation
Predictive Maintenance	Uses real-time data to predict failures	Optimizes maintenance schedules, minimizes breakdowns	Higher cost due to advanced monitoring technology
Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)	Company-wide proactive maintenance culture	Improves overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)	Requires extensive workforce involvement and training

Preventive Maintenance is a balanced approach, offering a structured yet cost-effective way to ensure operational reliability.

Overcoming Challenges of Deploying Preventive Maintenance and How to Overcome Them?

Like any strategy, preventive maintenance is susceptible to challenges. However, they are not a concern if properly planned and executed. The strategy must be like – expand as you go, rather than starting big. Analyzing the effectiveness and the insights from the results reassures investing in it as things start moving forward.

1. High Initial Costs

Start small – begin working on key assets and progressively implement it.

2. No Skilled workforce

Train your technicians in predictive/preventive maintenance techniques.

3. Change Management

Let stakeholders know long-term investment costs and efficiency benefits.

4. Data Issues
   CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems) is used to track data on a more systematic level.

Begin Preventive Maintenance In Your Business

Now that we know about the challenges and their solutions, it’s time to make the first steps.

Step 1: Identify Critical Assets

Start by focusing on the machinery that is critical to business operations and has higher downtime costs.

Step 2: Formulate a Maintenance Plan

When in doubt, manufacturer recommendations and usage data lead the way followed by know-how and history from past failures.

Step 3: Use CMMS

An online tracking system is used to schedule and track maintenance activities better.

Step 4: Train your team

Ensure that preventive tasks are prioritized and understood by all, including maintenance staff and laborers.

Step 5: Remain vigilant and make it a process of continual enhancement

Leverage maintenance KPIs like MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and Mean Time to Repair as your map progresses.

Preparing a Checklist for Planned Maintenance

This ensures uniform and swift maintenance practices through a well-rounded checklist. Checklist varies per industry and its components, but for a start, here is an example of a preventive maintenance checklist for a manufacturing machine:

• Lubricate moving parts weekly
• Inspect and replace worn-out belts quarterly
• Test safety systems monthly
• Clean filters and vents every two weeks
• Check for unusual vibrations or noises daily

Form customized checklists according to industry practices and equipment types.

Takeaway

Preventive maintenance keeps machines running and creates an attractive culture of reliability, process efficiency, and cost savings. Downtime costs from maintenance are offset, and the business that proactively manages its assets goes one step ahead to stay profitable in the long term for competitive advantage. 

A well-planned strategy that identifies machinery requiring regular maintenance, combined with a preventive maintenance CMMS software, can help businesses achieve the rare goal of maximizing uptime. These software solutions automate PM tasks, manage assets, schedule jobs, and assign maintenance teams to ensure an efficient and effective maintenance process. To implement the best strategy, connect with experts from PM software providers, share your asset data, and collaborate to develop a tailored maintenance plan that works for your operations.