Moving to a Preventative Maintenance Program

Changing your maintenance strategy

Choosing the right maintenance strategy

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 what are some of the reasons it has not changed and what can you do about it?

  • 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.

Making the move to preventative maintenance

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:

  1. Acknowledge the need for change: Most companies think they are better than they really are at practicing the right maintenance strategy.
  2. Recognise it’s a journey: Plan to sustain the journey when leadership changes.
  3. Select an implementation model: Choose a model that best works for your organization and make sure that it involves an early culture component.
  4. Assess your true status: Perform a brutally transparent investigation, including significant plant-floor input.
  5. Set the vital few targets: Select the right leading and lagging KPIs that will help you reach your goal.
  6. Identify and reward behaviors: Reward all behaviors and tasks that support the KPIs.
  7. Get all departments involved: Achieving this goal is a collective and collaborative effort.
  8. Communicate: Keep an open and transparent line of communication with all stakeholders to track progress and celebrate successes.
  9. Nurture and sustain: Maintain a robust continuous-improvement process. Remember, change takes time and you will need to be persistent.