What are the Main Types of Maintenance Strategy? Preventive vs Predictive vs Reactive Maintenance

Preventive Maintenance Strategy

The most common type of maintenance strategy: Preventative Maintenance, also spelled Preventative Maintenance, refers to scheduled, routine maintenance to help keep equipment up and running and reduces unscheduled downtime and major repairs.

The direct benefits of Preventive Maintenance can be summarized as follow:

• Prolonged life of equipment and assets
• Reduced downtime
• Increased safety and reduced risk of injury
• Improved production

Preventive Maintenance includes much more than simply performing routine maintenance on equipment. It also involves maintaining accurate records of every inspection and servicing, as well as knowing the lifespan of each part to understand the replacement frequency. These records can help maintenance technicians anticipate the appropriate time to change parts and can also help diagnose problems when they occur. Preventive Maintenance software helps collect and organize this information so it is readily available to maintenance technicians.

Predictive Maintenance

With Predictive Maintenance, the aim is to predict future failures before they happen. These predictions are based on the data gathered through the use of various condition monitoring sensors and techniques.

The disadvantages of Predictive Maintenance are the high costs associated with establishing a complete IoT system with sensors, transmission costs, analysis, as well as the extra work that may be required to get employees to use this advanced technology.

Reactive Maintenance

Also known as breakdown or run-to-failure, reactive Maintenance focuses on restoring equipment to normal operation after a breakdown. Since repairs are not planned, it’s a good method to employ for equipment that is not essential for operations or has a low cost.

The main disadvantages to Reactive Maintenance can be summarized as follow:

• Shorter life expectancies of assets
• Unplanned downtime
• Safety issues
• Inefficient use of resources

Reactive Maintenance should only be used on equipment that is not essential for operations or quick to repair as to not justify the cost and time expenditure necessary to implement Preventive or Predictive Maintenance strategies.

Bridging the gap between Preventive and Predictive Maintenance

While Predictive Maintenance offers many benefits, high initial implementation costs and training requirements might be a barrier. By leveraging Augmented Reality, AR PM replace paper spreadsheets by AR checklists pinned to physical assets and only available once the inspection location is reached avoiding fraudulent reports. Inspector are guided through the entire inspection routine optimizing productivity and improving the inspections quality. Meter reading can be easily logged such as temperature, machine vibration, oil pressure… All data collected allows you to store and analyze important information about existing and potential issues. Collecting this information can also save companies money by building a database of records for future improvement efforts. Last but not least, it enables less experienced technicians to solve more complex tasks and reduce training costs.