When companies come to ManagerPlus looking for our maintenance management software and expertise, it’s not because they aren’t familiar with preventive maintenance. The vast majority are already performing routine oil changes, replacing HVAC filters, lubricating heavy machinery, performing safety inspections, etc.
In most cases, what they need is for us to assist them in performing these services more efficiently–and we’re extremely effective at helping them accomplish this. So much so, in fact, that they’re often faced with a new dilemma: they now have spare resources and capacity that could be used to perform more advanced forms of preventive maintenance, but they’re not sure if doing so would yield additional benefits.
In other words, we’re able to help them make it so easy to do the preventive maintenance they’ve always been doing, they now have to ask whether they should do more, and whether there is such a thing as too much.
So…is there?
The answer is: it depends, but generally speaking, there’s no such thing as too much preventive maintenance if you’re doing it properly.
According to “Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices” by Ramesh Gulati, companies that run “Best Practice Benchmark” operations schedule between 10-40% of their maintenance work. World class organizations, on the other hand, schedule upwards of 85% of their overall maintenance workload.
The thinking here is that, by proactively scheduling as much of their maintenance work as possible, these companies are able to maximize equipment up-time, utilization rates, and resale value. This makes sense–most authoritative sources suggest that preventive maintenance is that effective that it can be up to 20 times more cost effective than run to failure maintenance.
Using preventive maintenance software, it’s easy to determine how much of your work is scheduled versus unscheduled. The quickest way to find this information is to run the “Work Order Summary” report in the Reports Module (in our Enterprise Desktop product). This will show a quick count of the number of work orders associated with scheduled work as well as the number that were associated with unscheduled work. Dividing the number of unscheduled WOs by the total overall (unscheduled plus scheduled) and multiplying the result by 100 will give you the percentage of unscheduled work orders.
In the below example (a partial view of the final page of the Work Order Summary report), we can see the count of Scheduled WOs listed as 32, and the count of Unscheduled WOs listed as 12. If we take the 32 scheduled WOs and divide it by the Total WOs–44 in this case–and then multiply the result by 100, we come up with 72.7%.
Continue reading “Preventive Maintenance Best Practices: How much should you be doing?”