The benefits of preventative maintenance, if successful, rely on consistent practices designed to improve equipment performance and safety.

Preventative maintenance must rely on planned-ahead maintenance.

To understand run-to-failure maintenance, picture a light bulb. You replace it only when it fails. Then, a new bulb replaces the older one, fixing the asset.

However,  you can coordinate preventative maintenance easier than predictive maintenance, which requires planned monitoring strategies and interpretation of results.

Key Advantages of Preventative Maintenance

Planning makes the biggest impact in preventative maintenance. Unplanned, reactive maintenance carries overhead costs, easily avoided during the planning process. The cost of unplanned maintenance includes lost production, higher costs for parts and shipping, as well as time lost to responding emergencies and diagnosing faults while equipment is not working.

With preventative maintenance, equipment can shut down to coincide with breaks in the production schedule. Also, prior to shutting down, you can gather parts, supplies and personnel to minimize the time taken for a repair.