How to Choose the Right Maintenance Strategy

As industries advance with the addition of new technologies and processes, maintenance parallels this growth with its own. Predictive, preventive, and proactive maintenance strategies are rising to the top, enabling teams to find faults before they become failures, saving companies both time and money.

Now, you can have a plan without a strategy, but it’s impossible to have a strategy without a plan. Teams in the maintenance industry work hard, and using the right strategies helps delegate some of that work, keeping costs down and equipment reliable.

What Is Maintenance?

To fully understand what a maintenance strategy is, we first need to know what maintenance is and how important of a role it plays.

Maintenance activities are the replacement or repair of equipment and systems – before or after failure – and is done so that industrial equipment can operate to its fullest ability, for as long as possible.

Maintenance is done by maintenance teams, or “Maintainers”, and is important for any company that wants their equipment to be reliable and efficient. It’s at the heart of every industry, keeping the world – and the economy – running.

What are the four types of maintenance? For a more in-depth look, check out our guide on the topic.

What Is a Maintenance Strategy?

A maintenance strategy is a plan that determines the order and type of actions to be performed to keep a system working properly. It provides information about scheduling, and can be applied to as many tasks and work orders as needed. They are executed to improve efficiency and reliability, as well as to reduce costs.

There are two main questions to consider when choosing the right type of maintenance strategy for you and your team:

1. Are we improving equipment reliability?
2. Are we reducing the cost of equipment failure?

These questions are key because they apply directly to two general types of maintenance:  risk-based maintenance and reliability-centered maintenance.

Risk-based maintenance essentially says that maintenance resources should go to the assets that carry the most risk if they fail. Teams assess the risk associated with each asset and identify failure modes to create a strategy that reduces the risk of faults.

Reliability-centered maintenance optimizes maintenance programs using safe minimum levels of asset upkeep. Its job is to match each asset with the right maintenance technique, delivering the most cost-effective result.

Looking at these two types of maintenance, keep in mind the goal that you’re trying to achieve. There is no cookie-cutter maintenance strategy – each team and facility is unique.

Types of Maintenance Strategies

There are a number of maintenance strategies on the market today, and they range from the optimization of existing maintenance routines, to eliminating the causes of failures, to minimizing maintenance requirements.

Improvements in machine learning, AI, and IoT technologies have directly impacted maintenance plans and how maintainers approach downtime reduction in the industry. It’s allowing teams to plan more efficiently, basically clearing the way for maintenance strategies to evolve. As they became more defined, the different maintenance types started to lend themselves to specific facilities and equipment, each having its own uses and benefits.

It’s good practice to follow this natural evolution, and to consider each maintenance department and their capabilities and limitations. Following are the most used maintenance strategies.

Corrective Maintenance / Reactive Maintenance (Run-to-Failure) 

Run-to-failure maintenance programs are the absence of any actual maintenance strategy. When we talk about reactive maintenance, we’re talking about teams letting equipment breakdown fully, and reacting to fix it. Because of its unplanned nature, reactive maintenance generally costs more than the others, and isn’t great for any company budget.

Corrective maintenance is similar yet different, and it isn’t all bad. It gives you the opportunity to plan corrective maintenance if you catch the fault before it happens. It can still end up being costly, so planning corrective maintenance is of utmost importance so you aren’t scrambling when a failure occurs.

Preventive Maintenance

This is the most simple and cost effective strategy. It includes regular maintenance of machines and equipment through visual inspections and predetermined inspection routes. Preventive maintenance works to fix problems before they arise. There are two types of preventive maintenance, time-based (calendar-based) and usage-based.

Time-based preventive maintenance is based on a schedule; Maintainers might decide to do a visual inspection of certain equipment once per month. It’s great for seasonal maintenance, but you might replace equipment before it’s necessary or miss a fault because of the gap between inspections.

Condition-Based Maintenance

Condition-based maintenance – CbM – combines strategy with condition monitoring technology. It uses vibration analysis, acoustic emission, thermography, and oil analysis to assess the current condition of an asset.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance is essentially a more accurate version of condition-based maintenance. Tracking the condition of equipment enables teams to detect irregularities instantly based on operating patterns. Using real-time data collection, algorithms are built to predict equipment failures in the future.

Prescriptive Maintenance

This is the most advanced way to look at asset maintenance. Not only does it predict potential failures, it works alongside AI and machine learning to build prescriptive algorithms. They can predict failure as well as offer solutions for future issues.

Proactive Maintenance

Proactive maintenance works to identify and fix the reasons for equipment failure before it happens. To do this you collect and analyze machine data, focusing on machine reliability and reduced downtime. It combines predictive, preventive, and prescriptive maintenance strategies into one streamlined approach.

When you’re trying to choose a maintenance strategy, it can be tempting to go with either what looks to be the most effective or what’s the least expensive option. There are a variety of reasons this won’t work well, but it’s mainly about choosing the strategy based on what you know of your own maintenance team and equipment.

Implementing a Maintenance Strategy

When it’s time to decide which types of maintenance programs to choose, you should know maintenance management principles, the equipment being managed, and the facilities the equipment is in. Don’t forget – all maintenance strategies can work together if you get the timing right. Work on combining strategies to find the best fit for you, your team, and your assets.

When integrating strategies, maintainers rely on condition monitoring and proactive maintenance technology to monitor machines and catch failures before they happen. Smart Trac, for instance, is a sensor that collects real-time data, making it immediately available to maintenance teams for analysis.

Smart Trac measures vibration and temperature of each machine, giving you prescriptive insights about machine failure modes and changes in operation. With the information the sensor provides you, you’re able to accurately create maintenance tasks, work orders, and strategies that align completely with your goal. It’s a great example of how predictive and preventive maintenance strategies work together, and can integrate to make your team as proactive as possible.

With fault detection technology patented by the USPTO – the world’s leading patenting institution – we’re able to help maintenance teams improve their strategies and reduce unplanned downtime.

Remember, there’s no one way to create a maintenance strategy for your team. Most of the time, selecting a maintenance strategy involves mixing multiple types in order to fit the specific facility and equipment. Trial and error is a part of life, but using these tips will help you cut down on time spent fixing faults and failures.
For a demonstration on Smart Trac and how it can optimize your maintenance strategies, follow this link.