Preventative maintenance is one of the best ways to ensure more efficient operation in your facility. There are several benefits to catering to preventative maintenance services in your facilities, which is why many companies opt for it. Preventative maintenance is different than repair maintenance, generally occurring when you’ve undergone a shutdown or breakdown in your company. It offers more planning and better procedures.
There are several diverse types of preventative maintenance services. We have listed some of these below:
1. Time-Based Maintenance
In this kind of maintenance, you use time as a measure for maintenance. For example, you would change or clean the air filter every six months. You would replace a battery in a generator every two years, and so on. This kind of maintenance revolves around the knowledge that parts and modules wear down over time, which means that replacing these bits at the right time can prevent a breakdown.
The most significant advantage of maintenance of this kind is that you don’t need several people. Replacement is the work of one or two people at the very max. Disadvantages to this method may be that you may replace a part pre-emptively, and thus wastage may occur.
2. Usage-Based Maintenance
If you have a business that extensively uses a certain kind of machinery, then it is helpful to track the usage to know when it’s time for maintenance. The way to do so can be by compiling factors like operating hours, equipment monitors, etc. This helps you conduct usage-based maintenance. For instance, you can conduct maintenance after several operating hours have been completed.
Vehicle oil or machine oil is generally changed after a fair amount of usage.
3. Failure finding maintenance
This kind of maintenance ensures that protective devices are still working. Protective devices generally signal to words a recurring issue that you must fix to prevent a breakdown. Failure finding maintenance is one of the only branches of maintenance that help you discover hidden issues and provide a much more thorough analysis.
Preventative devices include fuses in electric circuits and protective device shutdowns when a generator’s cooling elements aren’t working. This kind of maintenance concerns deep maintenance instead of surface-level maintenance. If you have large machines, this maintenance will help you weed out the actual issue of your machine.
4. Predictive Maintenance
This type of maintenance requires technology. Sensors can capture information about the equipment and trigger specific preventative mechanisms automatically or notify you about what you need to do. This maintenance revolves around you noticing the essential machinery to notice any defects that may cause the system to crash.
Predictive maintenance is of the utmost importance if you own a manufacturing business, as a shutdown can cost you several thousands of dollars. They can also alter the supply chains and make your customers extremely unhappy.
5. Prescriptive Maintenance
Prescriptive maintenance uses technology to analyze what might happen in your processes or machines. It uses machine learning and analytics to provide a report on the maintenance you must engage in to ensure better operations in your company.
This is next-level maintenance, and only a few businesses engage in it.
