Preventive Maintenance Mindset

1. A Guide to Saving Your A**
HOW TO CREATE A PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE
MINDSET WITH YOUR INDUSTRIAL EQUIPMENT TEAMS
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Preventive maintenance helps you avoid
costly unscheduled stoppages and long-term
repair shutdowns.
When it comes to maintaining your industrial
equipment, you can’t afford to get caught
with your pants down.

2. Adopting a Preventive
Maintenance Mindset
Whatever your industry, regularly scheduled maintenance plays an important role
in reducing and even eliminating costly downtime caused by equipment failure,
breakdown or malfunction. This is true for anything you might consider critical
equipment: tools, machinery, motors and even the breakroom coffee maker. These
unscheduled stoppages and long-term repair shutdowns cut deep into efficiency
and profits, a reality that’s simply unacceptable in modern plant or workyard
operations.
To ensure your team and equipment are operating at maximum productivity,
maintenance philosophies must shift from a reactive strategy to a preventive
strategy. In this whitepaper, we’ll discuss the differences between these strategies
and the ways that you can implement a maintenance mindset with your team to
keep your motors, and the coffee maker, running smoothly.
Contents
The Art of Maintenance: Two Models
Reactive Maintenance Model ................................................................. 2
Preventive Maintenance Model ............................................................. 3
How to Create a “Preventive Maintenance Mindset”
Total Productive Management .............................................................. 4
Murphy’s Law ............................................................................................. 5
Put Maintenance in Your Schedule ...................................................... 5
Review Your Resources ........................................................................... 6
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3. The Art of Maintenance: Two Models
When it comes to maintenance of critical equipment, there are two strategies
that are normally employed. The reactive maintenance strategy is guaranteed to
cost you time and money, while a preventive maintenance strategy will help you
lead a successful plant and team by ensuring that your equipment gets the TLC it
deserves.
Reactive Maintenance Model
Listen, we get it. You work hard. You’re busy. You’ve got a million things to worry
about everyday. Walking the shop floor to check in on equipment an hour after
your wife called asking “When will you be home?” isn’t anyone’s idea of a good
time. Your team works with the equipment more than you do, and they’d tell you if
something was wrong, right? Besides, what’s that old saying? “If it ain’t broke, don’t
fix it”?
Too many plant and facility managers operate under this type of “maintenance”
strategy. With so many things going on, it’s easy to understand why. But here’s
the thing: employing a reactive maintenance strategy can cost you more than
5X as much in long term repair shutdowns and unscheduled stoppages than
implementing a preventive maintenance strategy.
2
5X
the cost of a preventive
maintenance strategy
<20% of your maintenance
should be reactive
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Sometimes a reactive maintenance strategy makes sense. If equipment parts are
easy to replace, cheap to repair and failure or malfunction doesn’t affect high-
value assets or critical processes then a reactive maintenance strategy is fine and
dandy. If you don’t proactively maintain the breakroom coffee maker, what’s the
cost if it goes down, as long as Tim Hortons is close by?
A simple rule of thumb: less than 20% of your maintenance should be reactive.

4. Preventive Maintenance Model
Preventive maintenance (sometimes called proactive maintenance) is a strategy
that focuses on routine, scheduled equipment check-ups. Just like those doctor
appointments you keep putting off, regularly scheduled maintenance check-ups
help to identify potential issues before they become full-blown emergencies.
Implementing a preventive maintenance strategy is one of the smartest things
a plant or facility manager can do, as it often saves an operation thousands of
dollars a year compared to a purely reactive maintenance strategy. While the exact
dollar value depends on the industry, equipment used and size of your operation,
according to some estimates, a preventive maintenance strategy can lead to a
40% reduction in costs, up to 50% reduction in downtime, and a 3 to 5% decrease
in equipment and capital investment by extending equipment life.
Maintenance
Strategy Scale
Basic
Medium
High
Preventive
Planned
Reactive
“Only when
sh*t breaks”
“Sometimes we remember
to schedule maintenance
check-ins”
“Regular scheduled check-
ins, documentation, and a
team that is on board”
40% 50%
reduction in costs reduction in downtime
Preventive maintenance is performed by creating a specific list of inspection
requirements, cleaning procedures, and testing and part replacement schedules.
While this may seem like a lot of work, as a strategy it’s made simple by creating
a preventive maintenance mindset in your team, and encouraging team members
to integrate these processes into their daily (or weekly) interactions with the
equipment they use and rely on. Like they say, “sharing is caring.”
More than 80% of your maintenance should be preventive.
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5. How to Create a “Preventive Maintenance Mindset”
Total Productive Maintenance
There’s an important reason that we refer to preventive maintenance as a mindset.
That’s because preventive maintenance is first and foremost a way of thinking.
It’s a particular mentality that encourages a team to take responsibility for the
equipment they use and empowers them to take the necessary steps to ensure
it’s running properly. It also promotes open communication when something isn’t
working quite like it should.
This mentality is often expressed as the total productive maintenance (TPM)
approach. TPM grew from Lean manufacturing processes. It seeks to involve
operators and equipment handlers in the maintenance of the equipment they use
and emphasizes the importance of proactive and preventive maintenance. The
goals of TPM are to eliminate breakdowns, stops and defects, and to encourage a
safe work environment.
The Goals of TPM
NO BREAKDOWNS
NO STOPS
NO DEFECTS
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6. Murphy’s Law
One of the easiest ways to create a preventive maintenance mindset is to prepare
for failure. Not in a “the sky is falling” kind of way, but by being realistic about the
possibility of something breaking down, malfunctioning, or needing to be serviced.
Like Murphy’s Law says, “shit that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
Make sure that you have critical spares on hand, your equipment documentation is
up to date, and that you have a parts standardization regime. Then make sure that
your team knows how to access documentation and critical spare logs, and what
to do when they don’t know.
Finally, make sure you’ve got all this documentation backed up in case of a fire,
flood, tornado or alien invasion.
Put Maintenance in Your Schedule
It has often been said that writing something down makes it seem more
permanent. We’re more likely to follow through on commitments, reach our goals
and remember things once we write them down. That’s why you should put your
maintenance check-ups in the calendar for everyone to see.
Help foster a preventive maintenance mindset by scheduling your maintenance
check-ups with the whole team. Take a scheduled break, bust out the chocolate
glazed donuts, and walk the shop with the entire team to check in on equipment.
If having the whole team off the floor for an hour is impossible (which we totally
understand), break up the team into smaller groups and put them on a specific
maintenance schedule.
Most importantly: MAKE A SCHEDULE AND STICK TO IT.
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7. Review Your Resources
When it comes to preventive maintenance, the reality is that sometimes you just
can’t do it on your own. Even if your operators and equipment handlers are the
2010 Canadian Olympic hockey team of operators and equipment handlers, they
simply might not have the time, resources or training to successfully pull off a
preventive maintenance strategy.
Understanding exactly what resources you have and what you can do to
encourage a preventive maintenance mindset can give you a great indication
of your team’s capacity and let you know whether it’s time to look for external
maintenance management help.
Now that you know how to develop a preventive maintenance mindset in your
shop, plant or operations team, it’s time to get to work.
Brush off your clipboard, fire up your equipment documentation software and
get started. If you’re still not convinced that you need a preventive maintenance
strategy or a team that’s committed to fixing problems before they happen just
think: do you REALLY want to be the person to tell the whole plant floor that
there’s no coffee in the breakroom because you forgot to check the heating coil
last week?
We didn’t think so...
Check out what happens
when you skip maintenance
check-up day...
WATCH VIDEO
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