January 2005

Industrial Preventive Maintenance (PM)

Improving an industrial preventive maintenance process can be a daunting task. Existing PM processes have often developed continuously over many years. The current preventive maintenance process may therefore be hard to organize and analyze.

Where does one start to improving an existing PM process?

The PM tasks are often divided by department in any given plant. There may be a PM “list” for Instrumentation, one for operations, one for mechanical maintenance, lubrication, electrical maintenance, etc.

Figure 1. Existing PM’s are often done by each department in a plant, independent from each other.

In improving industrial preventive maintenance it is important to start by looking at what the equipment need, not how much time each department have, or what each department want to do. For example; if we list the inspections and PM needed for an AC Motor, it may look something like this:

Motor AC PM

If the industrial preventive maintenance process is set up correctly, your updated PM avoids overlap in tasks and will be more cost effective:

Figure 2. Updated, cost effective PM process

For more information on IDCON’s Industrial Preventive Maintenance consulting and Training.