Preventive Maintenance: On Schedule vs On Demand?

Preventive maintenance (PM) is a procedure of performing service and maintenance activities to identify and fix problems before they cause major failures. Simple examples of preventive maintenance are oil changes on your car to protect the engine from breaking, or changing HVAC filters before the air conditioner gets clogged up and stops working.

Here’s How Preventive Maintenance Helps You:

• Prevents failure and breakdown: By catching smaller problems sooner in the cycle, PM helps you prevent bigger failures, breakdowns, and downtime. 
• Less costly repairs: PM usually identifies an opportunity to service, repair, and replace parts or equipment that are less costly than break fixes 

• Increase asset/equipment life: Preventive maintenance is known to increase the life of assets and equipment by keeping operating conditions within permissible limits and also by preventing failures.

Your assets are critical to your business operations, and preventive maintenance is key to keep those assets running. But the million-dollar question is when to perform these preventive maintenance tasks. Should PMs be done on a schedule at a regular time interval or on-demand?

Preventive Maintenance On Schedule

Scheduled PM takes place at regular time intervals, regardless of the equipment usage or wear. This type of PM makes sure the equipment is overhauled and checked at a regular frequency to ensure proper operating conditions and to minimize risk of breakdown. Scheduled PMs could incur a lot of cost for no real benefit, especially if the equipment has not been used, is relatively newer or iis in great condition.

Preventive Maintenance On-Demand

On-demand PM takes place when equipment starts showing an indication of a problem. For example, taking your vehicle to a mechanic when the ‘check engine’ indicator turns on. On-demand PM requires active monitoring and alerting of the equipment’s operating parameters, be it manual or automated using sensors, meters, PLCs, etc. 

Regardless of doing scheduled or on-demand PM, you need a good tool that can help you and your team do the job properly and efficiently. Chekhub’s work tickets let you store all the relevant information such as location, asset, date and time of the maintenance, team/member who would be performing the work, asset lifecycle history, technician reports, etc. You can schedule repetitive PM at desired intervals or integrate with your monitoring systems and create trigger-based PM tickets. Our simplified workflow means your team spends little to no time in overhead activities and can focus on getting the job done. With enterprise-grade mobile applications for all major platforms, your technicians get actionable information on what needs to get done, when it needs to get done, and where it needs to get done. This will ensure everything gets done right the first time.

Learn how to improve efficiency and profitability, streamline your processes and simplify your service operations using Chekhub. Sign up for a free trial or a demo today!