Preventive Maintenance to Improve Safety, Quality & Efficiency

Resources

April 28, 2020

Resource: Blog Industry: Industrial
Tags: Safety

Preventive Maintenance Image

Maintenance programs in general, and preventive maintenance programs in particular, have obvious benefits in terms of keeping equipment running properly and preventing downtime. This brings an equally obvious benefit to operational efficiency and it decreases costs and waste as well.

But these aren't the only benefits that come with a well-designed preventive maintenance program. If you're practicing preventive maintenance at your facility instead of simply relying on reactive maintenance, you'll see safety and quality improvements as well.

We'll explain the benefits to efficiency, safety, and quality you'll gain from practicing preventive maintenance further in this brief article.

Let us know if you need any help with the maintenance training at your facility as you try to improve your maintenance program and perhaps begin practice preventive maintenance yourself.

Preventive Maintenance & Improvements to Reliability and Efficiency

Organizations that practice reactive maintenance, or rely on reactive maintenance for a large part of their maintenance activities, are playing an endless and costly game of whack-a-mole. They're chasing problems and trying to fix them instead of working in advance to prevent them.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between maintenance programs that focus on reactive maintenance and those that focus on preventive maintenance. And it's a big difference. One study by the McKinsey Global Institute, titled "Unlocking the Potential of the Internet of Things," claims that:

Predictive maintenance can lead to a savings from $240 billion to $627 billion for manufacturers by 2020.

Or consider this ROI calculation for preventive maintenance. A study published at Micromain.com that analyzed the results of a Jones Lang LaSalle preventive maintenance partnership with a large telecommunications organization showed an extraordinary ROI of more than 500%:

After careful research and analysis, the team concluded that preventive maintenance not only pays for itself, but results in an average 545% return on investment – an almost unheard return in the business world today.

When you practice preventive maintenance, and avoid reactive maintenance, your machines and equipment will be more reliable and more efficient, and your downtime will be less. And that's money in the bank.

Preventive Maintenance & Improvements to Quality

Organizations that don't practice preventive maintenance, and that lead high percentages of their overall maintenance activities to reactive maintenance, inevitably wind up with greater variability and of course breakdowns. These lead to decreased standardization and consistency, and increased product damage, all of which means lower quality.

Preventive Maintenance & Improvements to Safety

If you're doing preventive maintenance for no other reason--although we've already discussed several good reasons to do it--then do it for the benefits to occupational safety and health.

Studies consistently show a strong correlation between the amount of preventive maintenance an organization does and the organization's safety incident rates (meaning, the more preventive maintenance performed, the lower the incident rate and, conversely, the less preventive maintenance performed, the higher the incident rate. In fact, if you want to look at a KPI for your safety program, one to consider is the amount of reactive maintenance you perform (with the goal being, obviously, to reduce your percentage of reactive maintenance).

Conclusion: A Properly Designed Preventive Maintenance Program Brings Many Benefits to an Organization

If you're thinking of improving maintenance at your organization, or implementing a more robust preventive maintenance program, the benefits of preventive maintenance we've touched on above will help you make that business case and will reward your initial investment time and time again.

Our friend and business partner Dr. Klaus Blache of the University of Tennessee's Reliability and Maintainability Center suggests that "top quartile" companies use preventive maintenance around 10% of the time and use preventive maintenance nearly 70% of the time. Where are you in this preventive maintenance v. reactive maintenance ratio?

Hot tip: we partner with the UT-RMC in offering a Reliability & Maintainability Implementation Certification--learn more by clicking that link you just passed.

Let us know if we can be of any assistance with your maintenance training programs--we have maintenance training expertise, learning management systems, online maintenance training courses, mobile apps for training and incident reporting, and more.

Want to Know More?

Reach out and a Vector Solutions representative will respond back to help answer any questions you might have.

Contact Us