Reviewing Preventive Maintenance Tasks

Every so often, you should make a point of reviewing your preventive maintenance tasks. This is especially true if you use a CMMS...but even if you're still working manually, it's a good idea to review your procedures.

For example, you might conduct a review every six months. If you use a CMMS, go through each PM task description and check the following:

Is the estimated time reasonable?

For example, if your task description estimates that the job takes an hour, but you look over recent work order statistics and see that the job always takes much longer, you should make the time estimate more realistic. (Of course, if you think the time estimate is realistic, then maybe you've got a different problem. For example, if a particular unit keeps needing more work than expected, maybe it's time to consider buying a replacement or doing a major overhaul.)

Does the material list need to be updated?

Again, you should check recent work order statistics for the unit. If there are materials or spare parts that are consistently needed for a particular PM job, they should be set aside so they're available each time the job is scheduled.

Does the task description cover all the bases?

Review recent work orders on the unit and see if there's any pattern of trouble you can watch for during preventive maintenance. For example, if you've made several similar repairs on the same unit, you should considering adding something to the standard maintenance procedures for that unit: inspections that might turn up the beginning of a problem, or perhaps automatically replacing parts that have a tendency to break frequently.

Does the schedule need to be adjusted?

If a unit constantly has problems before its next schedule maintenance, maybe you need to schedule maintenance more often so that you catch problems before they happen. Similarly, if PM inspections on a particular unit never find anything wrong, maybe you can safely increase the time between inspections in order to lighten your work load.

You might also adjust your schedules to balance PM tasks over a period of time. For example, if you have a lot of PM jobs that come due on the first of the month, consider adjusting your schedules so that the jobs are spaced throughout the month. This will usually make it easier for workers to cope with PM jobs as well as corrective jobs.