Preventive maintenance

Preventive maintenance can be defined as the care and servicing by personnel for the purpose of maintaining equipments, materials and facilities in good conditions by providing systematic inspections, detections and control to avoid failures and defects.

Preventive maintenance provides tests, adjustments, measurements, and replacements to avoid faults to occur.

On the contrary of the maintenance, the goal of the preventive maintenance is to ensure the longevity of the equipments. The preventive maintenance doesn’t replace equipments but guarantees that they will not have to be replaced or repaired.

Preventive maintenance is a schedule of planned maintenance actions. The aim is the prevention of breakdowns and failures.

Preventive maintenance provides many benefits for the company: first, it improves system reliability, it can also decrease the cost of replacement and the system downtime and it can lead to important spaces for inventory management.

Preventive maintenance can be very useful if the company has an increasing failure rate. Another point is that resort to preventive maintenance is a mean to reduce costs due to machines purchasing which replace other machines that break down.

Provide cleaning maintenance means establishing a maintenance planning with periodic inspections, cleaning and development.

3 categories of preventive maintenance are important to be considered:

• The first subgroup is the scheduled maintenance: this maintenance obeys to very strict slots; each employee is responsible of one specific task in relation with company's equipment.

• The second is the conditional maintenance: the employees see by themselves the state of the company’s equipment and report it to the boss.

• The third is the predictive maintenance: it’s the periodic monitoring of the equipments. The evolution of material degradation is closely observed.