A maintenance plan is a document that defines work to maintain assets in a facility proactively. The contents of the document help you facilitate the continual use of an asset at optimum performance. Your facility can avoid significant breakdowns or unforeseen renewal if you stick to the guidelines in the plan.
Preventive vs Corrective Maintenance
There are many types of maintenance plans and strategies. There are primarily two categories, Preventive and Corrective. Each has more sub-categories below. Below is a breakdown for better illustration.
When we are doing preventive maintenance, we are merely doing a task before the equipment fails. When we are doing corrective maintenance, we are reinstating the equipment or system to its functionality.
Corrective Maintenance Types
Deferred
A deferred plan generally refers to a run-to-failure maintenance strategy. Such an approach means full usage of non-essential equipment or part until it can no longer function properly. As it is not an essential part of the system, you can choose to defer its repair or replacement to a later date. An example, the CCTV recorder hard-disk is faulty. You arrange for a date and time to replace the hard disk while a temporary measure such as backup hard-disks kick in. Do note, this only applies to non-essential equipment or parts.
Emergency/Breakdown
This is probably one of the most expensive maintenance strategies. This type of strategy typically leads to longer equipment outages and more impact on productivity. Imagine, you lose the ability to enter your office due to a faulty EM-lock or your card reader doesn’t work. You are your colleagues lose the entire day waiting for a way to get in. Also, such a strategy is much less safe. An example would be if a piece of loose equipment falls on someone causing injury and subjecting the organization to legal redress.
Preventive Maintenance Types
Time-Based
Time-Based Maintenance refers to replacing or renewing an item to restore its reliability at a fixed time, interval or usage regardless of its condition. An example would be the replacement of specific equipment when we are aware of its end-of-life by the manufacturer.
Risk-Based
Risk-Based Maintenance (RBM) is when you use a risk assessment methodology to assign your maintenance resources to those assets that carry the most risk in case of a failure (remembering that risk = likelihood x consequence). An example of this is a more detailed inspection of non-static equipment such as a bracket for an EM-lock as compared to static equipment like cabling etc.
Failure Finding
Detecting hidden failures typically associated with Failure Finding Maintenance. These generally apply to equipment with redundancy functions. An example would be the backup batteries for the EM-lock of the doors. We do a power failure test to see if the backup battery kicks in when there is no power.
Condition-Based
Condition Based Maintenance is a strategy that looks for physical evidence that a failure is occurring or is about to occur. A good example is when we notice the sleeves of cables are wearing out or the wires are exposed. We can tell from a visual inspection that although the equipment still functions, we should get those cables replaced soon.
Predictive Maintenance
With the emergence of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IoT (Internet-Of-Things), we see a shift to Predictive Maintenance Strategies. More sensors and IoT devices are incorporated into systems. Larger corporations are embarking on such strategies. Predictive slightly differs from preventive as the maintenance work is only required when conditions dictate. This is still a fairly new space, but we can understand the tremendous cost savings in the future.
Why no mention of Comprehensive and Non-Comprehensive?
All the types of strategies we’ve spoken about can apply either comprehensive and non-comprehensive maintenance contracts. Of course, these two require their own article which we’ve written here. Feel free to review to get a better understanding between the two.
In conclusion, most real-world maintenance plans are not exclusive to one category or type. They are a mix of a few. In the future, we are bound to see more fully hybrid contracts with a gradual increase in demand for predictive maintenance models.
To find out more about how we can help you with your maintenance plan and support contracts, contact us here.
