Preventative maintenance
- What reacting costs a month
- $9,273.60
- Breakdown jobs a month
- 84
- Avoidable hours a month
- 193.2
Every figure printed on this site is arithmetic on the worked example we publish: 180 assets, 240 work orders a month, 35% of them raised as breakdowns, a breakdown job at 3.4 hours against 1.1 hours planned, a loaded technician cost of $48 an hour. Change any of those on the worksheet and the numbers change with them. Nothing here is a market statistic and nothing is quoted from a third party.
Preventative maintenance is doing work on a schedule so that the thing does not stop when you need it. That is the whole idea, and everything else is detail about which schedule, how often, and how you tell whether it is working. This page is the detail, written for somebody who has to defend the schedule to a plant manager who would rather run the machine: what the strategies actually are, how to pick between them per asset rather than for the whole site, and how to show that the money is going somewhere.
Open the Maintenance log Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Pick the strategy per asset, not per site
Some assets earn a calendar schedule, some a running-hours one, some genuinely should be run to failure because they are cheap, spare and quick to swap. A site with one strategy for everything is over-maintaining most of it and under-maintaining the rest.
Set the interval from the manufacturer, then move it on evidence
The manual is where you start, not where you finish. If nothing is ever found at the six-month check, the interval is wrong; if something is found every time, it is also wrong. The history is what tells you, which is the argument for keeping one.
Show the money, not the compliance rate
A PM completion percentage is easy to hit and easy to dismiss. On the worked example we publish, moving jobs from breakdown to planned is worth $111,283.20 a year in avoidable labour alone. That is the number that survives a budget meeting.
Preventative maintenance: common questions
What is the difference between preventive and preventative maintenance? Nothing. One is the American spelling and the other is the British one, and vendors use both. If a comparison page tells you they are different things, it is selling something.
How often should we do PM? Start with what the manufacturer says for that asset in that duty, then adjust on what the checks actually find. Any interval this site gave you would be a guess dressed as a benchmark.
Is run to failure ever right? Yes, deliberately, for assets that are cheap, held in spares and quick to change, where the failure does not stop anything or hurt anybody. It is a decision to record on the asset, not an admission.
Will it do what you need for Preventative maintenance?
Tell us what you maintain and how the schedule is kept today, and we will tell you plainly whether this is the right shape of tool for it.