What are the best maintenance strategies ?
It’s sometimes hard to navigate between the different types of maintenance management strategies that exist. That’s why we’ve summarized the essential characteristics of each to help you make your choice!
Reactive maintenance VS proactive maintenance
Equipment maintenance can be tackeld with 2 opposite approaches, either in a reactive or proactive way, by contrasting unplanned and planned maintenance.
Reactive maintenance
Reactive maintenance is based on the idea of waiting until equipment breaks before reacting. The maintenance team will repair or replace defective parts only after a failure has occurred.
Unfortunately, this unplanned maintenance approach often represents a lack of maintenance strategy. There is a tendency not to set up a regular maintenance program to save money. However, if used on the wrong piece of equipment, it can cost far more than the savings made.
Proactive maintenance
Proactively managing equipment failure means trying to fix the problem before it actually happens, i.e. from the very first symptoms, or even before the symptoms appear.
By anticipating potential failures, you can organize your maintenance activities and maintenance tasks in the most optimal way possible. You can also avoid unexpected breakdowns and costly unplanned downtime, maximize machine uptime, improve operation reliability, reduce operational costs by performing scheduled maintenance at the most cost-effective moment and more.
It is true that performing proactive maintenance requires more investments and efforts than reactive maintenance. But in order for reactive strategy to be appropriate, some very specific conditions need to be fulfilled.
Otherwise, if run-to-failure maintenance is adopted when the conditions are not fulfilled, there is a high risk that extremely costly unscheduled equipment downtime will occur. Moreover, small faults will lead to larger ones that could have been avoided and that are more costly to resolve. Finally, if you did not anticipate this malfunction, it is likely that you do not have the part in stock and that it is not directly available. This has a direct impact on your productivity.
Choosing a successful maintenance strategy is a delicate decision. It requires a good knowledge of existing types of maintenance strategies and maintenance systems as well as a good understanding of the field and what is actually happening in your production line.
Download The PDF document to discover what is the best maintenance strategy !
5 types of maintenances strategies
Corrective maintenance
Corrective, breakdown or run-to-failure maintenance uses a reactive approach: waiting for the breakage or failure to occur before repairing or replacing.
Using corrective maintenance for all your production assets, it will definitely result in longer downtime, higher maintenance costs and productivity losses.
Preventive maintenance
This type of maintenance works with a very precise maintenance schedule that allows to regularly check that a problem is not developing.
Because with preventive maintenance program inspections are performed at regular intervals regardless of the equipment’s conditions, the maintenance plan is not optimized and leads to excessive maintenance.
Predetermined maintenance
Manufacturers tend to make recommendations on what maintenance work and planning to follow (what inspections for which machines? How often? etc.). Following these instructions to plan your maintenance schedule is called predetermined maintenance.
Some of the work has been done for you by people who know the product inside out. It would be silly not to use it, but that’s not enough because the suggestions are obviously not tailored to your situation.
condition-based maintenance
The condition monitoring of the equipment allows to identify when a problem is occurring from its first symptoms. Instead of doing the inspections according to a regular schedule, inspections can be organized based on the analysis of assets condition (vibration, lubricant, electrical signals,..) that indicates equipment state and developing failures.
Instead of following a fixed schedule, the maintenance technicians can then organize a maintenance schedule more adapted to the condition of the machines. There is no need for regular check-ups.
predictive maintenance
Predictive maintenance uses the same idea as condition-based but goes one step further. This maintenance type uses all the data that can be obtained from condition monitoring systems, analyzes them and is able to understand the abnormal functioning of the machinery and therefore predict failures.
This strategy aims to optimize the use of maintenance resources to the maximum. Maintenance work can be planned in advance based on data analysis. Failures can be anticipated, which reduces, if not eliminates, unplanned downtime while avoiding the use of excessive maintenance resources.
At Insens, we know how hard it is to carry out the right facility maintenance. It is why we developed a cutting-edge predictive maintenance solution that can monitor machinery 24/7 while they are up-and-running.
If you think the predictive maintenance strategy is right for you, come and see what we have to offer!
why is our solution a powerful machine monitoring system?
RED is more than just a predictive maintenance system. Most condition monitoring solutions focus only on machine health diagnosis and detecting upcoming failures (e.g. thanks to vibration analysis, lubricant analysis or infrared thermography). Our cutting-edge technology allows us, with the same solution, to provide predictive maintenance diagnostics with high reliability but also to monitor energy consumption, offer optimization suggestions and report the savings made.
We help you eliminate unplanned downtime by predicting machine failure several months in advance.
We can detect sources of energy ineffficiencies and therefore help you minimize those losses to reduce you energy consumption.
We help you through your transition to a more sustainable approach. We can measure and quantify your efforts and therefore help you demonstrate them to your customers.