Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is the activity of performing scheduled inspections of operation and safety, adjustments, repairs, analysis, cleaning, lubrication and calibration that need to be performed on a regular basis following an established plan. The purpose is to prevent breakdowns or faults in the initial stage and correct them to maintain the installation in full working order at optimum efficiency levels.

Preventive maintenance enables us to detect repeated faults, reduce down times from stoppages, increase the working life of equipment, reduce repair costs, and detect weak points in the installation, among a long list of other advantages.

Advantages of Preventive Maintenance: 

- Reliability, the equipment works under better safety conditions as its status and operating conditions are  known. 

- Reducing down time, the time equipment/machinery is stopped.

- The equipment and installations last longer. 

- Reduction of the stock amounts in the Warehouse and, therefore reduction of costs, as the numbers of spare parts that are used most/least are adjusted.

- Uniformity in the Maintenance staff's workload as the activities are scheduled. 

- Lower repair costs. 


Preventive Maintenance phases:

- Technical inventory, with manuals, plans and characteristics of each piece of equipment.
- Technical procedures, lists of jobs to be performed on a regular basis,
- Control of how often jobs are performed, indicating the date when doing the job.
- Record of repairs, spare parts and costs that help planning. 

CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE

   Unplanned:  

Correction of breakdowns or faults as they occur and not in a planned way, unlike with Preventive Maintenance.

     This form of Maintenance prevents the causes behind the faults from being reliably diagnosed as it is not known whether it broke down due to improper handling, neglect, lack of knowledge on how to handle it or natural wear and tear, etc. 

     An example of this type of Unplanned Corrective Maintenance is the usual urgent repair after a breakdown that forced the damaged piece of equipment or machine to be stopped.

    Planned:  

Planned Corrective Maintenance consists of repairing a piece of equipment or a machine when the staff, spare parts and technical documents required for the job are available.