Downtime in a plant or facility leads to lost productivity. It disrupts operations, causes maintenance staff to divert time from scheduled projects, and can have significant negative business implications, including lost revenue, significant unplanned expenses, missed deadlines and damage to a company’s reputation. To avoid these problems, manufacturers and facility and plant managers are moving away from traditional maintenance methods where you wait for something to break, and then you fix it. Reactive approaches like this result in disruptions and unplanned downtime. A better approach is preventive maintenance, which is a routine for periodically inspecting equipment with the goal of...

Preventative maintenance is pro-active and is carefully designed to perform routine maintenance tasks at predetermined times to prevent asset failure. Planning a preventative maintenance schedule involves tracking data manually to determine when servicing needs to be performed. Using CMMS software can make it much less difficult than trying to do it manually.