Preventive Maintenance: An Overview

Preventive maintenance is the term given in caring and servicing of equipment and facilities to achieve a satisfactory operating condition. This is aimed at providing a systematic inspection, detection, and correction of any failure before its occurrence or before it turns into a major defect. It includes testing, adjusting, measuring and replacing any part in order to prevent fault from occurring.

Necessarily, a number of things can be considered falling under preventive maintenance. It may occur at home or outside of the home. At home, preventive maintenance may consists of cleaning the gutters, re-painting a home and trim regularly, oiling decks, clearing plants and brush away from the side of the home, and inspecting the condition of drains and vents. Any of these activities is designed to decrease the risk of damage keeping the home in good condition.

Outside home, preventive maintenance is even more vital. In today’s competitive world where the use of machines and equipment is an advantage, preventive maintenance plays an important role. Through it, equipment reliability are preserved and enhanced as worn components are detected before it can cause major failure. Some of the forms of preventive maintenance are as follows:

1. Checking of equipment
2. Overhauling at specific periods, partial or incomplete;
3. Changing of oil; and
4. Lubricating.

Advances in technology in tools for inspection and diagnosis have brought even more specific and effective equipment maintenance. This is because the idea behind a preventive maintenance program is to prevent all equipment breakdown before it occurs.
Despites the valuable effect of preventive maintenance, a lot of people still have misconception about it. One misconception is that preventive maintenance is excessively costly.

Logic proves that more costs are incurred for regularly scheduled downtime and maintenance than to operate equipment until repair is absolutely necessary. While this kind of maintenance involves costs, the long term benefits, however, and the saving associated with it will save much expense. In addition, the effective system service life of the equipment is maintained.

Thus, some of the long term benefits of preventive maintenance are as follows:

1. Improvement in system reliability;
2. Reduction in the replacement costs;
3. Diminution of system downtime; and
4. Enhancement of spares inventory management.

However, this should not be construed that preventive measurement should always be taken. Like some other kind of maintenance, it is not always advised. It only makes sense if the machine or equipment in question has an increased failure rate and that the overall cost of the preventive maintenance action is less than the overall cost of a corrective action.