Visiting plants in different corners of the world, we often are asked: “What are the current best practices for preventive maintenance (PM)?” We usually answer that we define preventive maintenance using 95 key elements. We also point out, to some people’s dismay, that there is no single silver bullet for improving PM, but rather many combined efforts will be required to eventually yield results. Here are a few key elements that have been extracted from our program of Current Best Practices (CBP) along with test questions and best practice (BP) examples to help you gauge how well your plant practices measure up.

If you currently have a preventive maintenance (PM) program in place and want to improve it, there are 10 steps you can follow to do so. Following these steps will uncover inefficiencies, including over- and under-scheduled PMs, equipment with PMs that don’t need them, and noncritical equipment that is prioritized over critical equipment for preventive maintenance.

You are 17 times more likely to introduce defects during equipment start-up than during normal equipment operation. Additionally, over 90 percent of rotating equipment has defects at start-up that result in premature equipment failures. What’s causing these start-up defects?

It’s essential that maintenance teams focus on failure modes to match the most suitable tool to the most likely problems. Vibration analysis helps diagnose the most common faults that rotating machines are susceptible to: imbalance, looseness, misalignment, and wear. The compatible trio of owning the right tools, knowing what to test, and sustaining a functional vibration testing program can potentially reduce repair costs and limit unproductive maintenance hours.

When Benjamin Franklin wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he was referring to fire safety. But, as you may know from experience, this saying holds true with regard to preventive maintenance (PM). Simply stated, preventive maintenance is an activity performed at a set interval to maintain an asset, regardless of its current condition. It’s a properly planned activity, where materials and parts are on hand and labor is scheduled ahead of time.