Manufacturers use a preventive maintenance plan template to help them to keep operations running smoothly and keep ahead of equipment maintenance, repairs, and routine part replacements.
It’s a strong alternative to reactive (corrective) maintenance, as we’ll examine…
The drawbacks of reactive (or corrective) maintenance
If you are running reactive or corrective maintenance, you are waiting for a machine to break down before acting, and this will result in high equipment downtime, in loss of production, and in a shorter lifetime of your machines and tooling.
Not to mention, fixing a machine that has broken down can take a long time, spare parts may need to be ordered and expedited, and products may have been improperly processed (leading to quality issues) too.
In other words, a reactive approach is usually very costly to a manufacturing organization.
More about preventive maintenance and its benefits
Preventive maintenance is work that is carried out on machines at a planned schedule. It minimizes downtime and lost production. (The planned maintenance work can often be arranged during non-production times, and this eliminates any need for lost production.)
If you are looking to implement a preventive maintenance program, first you need to establish which assets (e.g. CNC machines and their tooling, the facility’s air treatment system…) you are going to add to the plan.
What’s required in your preventive maintenance plan?
A good place to start is with the most critical machines within the manufacturing process. Here are three common considerations:
- Higher-tech equipment has more potential points of failure and needs much more preventive work.
- More expensive assets can reach the end of life much faster (resulting in a heavy loss for the company) if you let them break down regularly.
- Mission-critical machines just need to be up (available for running) when they might be needed, period.
Once you have a list of assets, you need to list all the specific maintenance tasks that need to be carried out on each asset, along with the frequency of each task.
This list of tasks can be added to an asset preventive maintenance plan document which allows you to track and monitor activities for each machine.
Use our preventive maintenance plan template for your own organization
Here is a preventive maintenance plan example template, in Excel, that you can download and use for creating your own plan. Don’t forget to use the frequency key at the bottom of the sheet to add task frequency that suits you and to also fill in who completed the sheet and when.
We have included an example plan (in this case for a CNC machine) to follow in a separate tab in the Excel sheet for your reference, but you can also examine it below:
You may also find these posts from our blog ‘QualityInspection.org’ interesting, too:
- Two Preventive Maintenance Examples: Go for More Structure
- Are Preventive Maintenance and Process Control the Same Thing?
- 5 steps for a Chinese factory to improve its efficiency
And remember to listen to our podcast episode about the benefits of preventive maintenance here:
Need help now?
If you need any help with setting up a preventive maintenance plan you can contact us for free and talk through your situation.
