PM Does Not Work

You may or may not have noticed that when you take a piece of equipment off line to do some form of Preventive Maintenance (PM) that when you put it back online something else usually happens that requires an emergency or unplanned repair. Typically this results from an intrusive PM or sometimes it is a result of just the stress of shutting a machine or process down and starting it back up. Either way, there are often other options that would either eliminate OEM PM's, substitute with some Predictive Maintenance technology, or modify in some way to reduce the negative impacts yielding greater reliability.

There is an excellent article that I came across that discusses the details of the results of a PM optimization process. The article points out that typically OEM PM's, on average:
o 30% don't add value and should be eliminated
o 30% should be replaced with Predictive Maintenance (PdM) tasks
o 30% could add value if re-engineered

So for a typical plant, 90% of all PM activities should be evaluated:

http://www.reliabilityweb.com/art08/pm_does_not_work.htm

If you are considering a strategy to do PM optimization, one of the best ways is to do a Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) evaluation. This is a rigorous approach and can be very time consuming, which often scares off would be users. However, judicious application of RCM by using a criticality ranking approach (see http://www.waterandwastewater.com/videos/view_video.php?viewkey=538c593fbdabb0c5ef2c) to filter your systems and only analyze the most critical will provide an optimum use of the technique. On the rest of your systems, simply apply a best practice approach to doing your PM work. Checkout this excellent resource handbook for best practice for PM and condition based monitoring here: http://www.idcon.com/preventive-maintenance-book.htm.