Preventive maintenance

Preventive maintenance

Major forms of the preventive maintenance are the regular inspection and lubrication, adjustment is normally practiced on major items of equipment. It is to prevent future breakdown of facilities or equipment before its actual occurrence.

It is usually defined as a planned maintenance action that helps to prevent breakdowns and failures of facilities or equipment it is performed on an asset while the asset is still capable of functioning in a satisfactory manner for some time.

It is difficult to determine the correct level of preventive-maintenance to apply. Often, help can be obtained from the maintenance schedules proposed by equipment manufacturers, but a record of the frequency of unscheduled breakdown and their costs, is needed to institute and refine preventive maintenance programmes.

Preventive-maintenance should be considered when: the failure rate of the equipment starts to increase rapidly after a period during which it has been low; the cost of preventive maintenance attention should be less than the repair costs; equipment failure is likely to disrupt subsequent production operations or cause customer dissatisfaction and Injury could result from equipment breakdown.

Preventive maintenance assists to preserve and enhance equipment reliability. Equipment is inspected to determine whether further maintenance attention is required. The common costs are supplies and replacement parts; labour and equipment downtime.

These costs will increase as the frequency of preventive-maintenance increases. An increase in preventive maintenance cost will reduce the corrective maintenance cost. The benefits of preventive-maintenance are that it prolongs the life of the plant, increase the terminal salvage value of an organization’s asset, have a salutary effect on the quality of the goods and services produced and increases the safety of the operations involved (Iwarere, 2004).