Moving from a Reactive to a Preventative Maintenance Program

By Duncan McLeod
15 March 2021

More than half of facilities still rely on reactive maintenance as their overall maintenance strategy. For decades, evidence has demonstrated the greater benefits of performing preventative maintenance. So much so, that the preventative maintenance framework makes the old way of thinking and acting insufficient, less effective, and less desirable. So why has it not changed and what can you do about it?

Here are some reasons:

• Few truly understand the relationship between reliability-based maintenance and business/operational performance.
• Maintenance has not done a good job of monetising the benefits. Savings from preventative maintenance need to be relatable and believable by management in terms of cost of time, production and people.
• Moving from reactive to preventative is a long-term process. It’s about enabling employees and using that momentum to improve the process.

Moving from a reactive to a preventative maintenance program

Moving from reactive to preventative maintenance is much like climbing a sand dune. If you don’t keep moving forward, you’ll slide back to the bottom.

Here’s a short list to guide you to make the change:

• Acknowledge the need for change. Most companies think they are better than they really are.
• Recognise it’s a journey. Plan to sustain the journey when leadership changes.
• Select an implementation model that works for your organization and make sure that it involves an early culture component.
• Assess your true status. Perform a brutally transparent investigation, including significant plant-floor input.
• Set the vital few targets (leading and lagging KPIs) that must be done well.
• Identify and reward behaviors that support the KPIs.
• Get all departments involved.
• Communicate progress and celebrate successes.
• Nurture and sustain a robust continuous-improvement process. Remember, change takes time and you will need to be persistent.