Did you realize that most Preventive Maintenance programs have not been engineered, they just evolved?  With every regulation or component failure, both the number of PM tasks and the frequency of the tasks being executed increases, until it consumes 30-50% of your workforce and you are lulled into a false sense of security that you have evolved into a Best Practice or World Class organization.” Let’s be clear, it is impossible to evolve into Best Practice, it must be carefully engineered.

In fact, after numerous benchmarking studies, data states factually that most maintenance organizations are doing almost exactly the same type of maintenance they’ve always done.  Now here’s the scary part.  A closer look at all Preventive Maintenance (PM) tasks reveals that on average:

• 30% don’t add value and should be eliminated
• 30% should be replaced with Predictive Maintenance (PdM) tasks
• 30% could add value if re-engineered

What that means to you is, less than 10% of your PMs are truly adding value as written.  Or, in other words, potentially, 90% of your PM tasks should be eliminated or changed.  What’s worse, when you conduct unnecessary, invasive maintenance, you actually introduce variability and potential defects into

your asset and process reliability.  That’s right! You are actually causing some failures and you don’t even know it!

What to do about the problem?

Striking the right balance of Preventive and Predictive Maintenance is absolutely necessary and it offers a rare opportunity to save millions of dollars through:

• Lower maintenance costs
• Lower spare parts inventories
• Lower energy consumption
• Better safety performance
• Increased throughput capacity

Achieving these results is not easy.  For starters, you need to have a common vision, a basic implementation strategy and a clear understanding of what’s required for success. Let’s look at the 6 most important steps you can take to begin achieving your reliability goals.

1. Receive training in PM/PdM Best Practices.
2. Update your functional hierarchy so that you have a clear understanding of the machines in your facility and their component configuration.  
3. Conduct a Criticality Assessment on your assets. You know, the assessment you used to help determine maintenance strategy, prioritize work orders and make better overall risk management decisions.
4. Develop a complete understanding of the failure modes that are present or may be present in your components.  These failure modes come from 2 places: 1) the inherent design of the machine and 2) the operating context in which they are used on a daily basis.
5. Perform a Preventive Maintenance Evaluation (PME) where you identify each PM Task and any connection it may have to a failure mode you are experiencing. Are the PMs causing the failure or addressing it?  If they aren’t addressing and reducing failures, then they add no value.
6. Then believe in the outcome of your PME.  If it says a PM adds value, do it!  If it shows it doesn’t, then re-write/re-engineer it so it does, re-assign it to the appropriate PdM Technologies or get rid of it! See the chart below.


By Ricky Smith CMRP, PetroSkills Reliability Discipline Leader