Preventive maintenance in industry 4.0

Preventive maintenance refers to planned inspections and repairs: these maintenance plans or PMMS (Preventive Maintenance Management Systems) are created to set reminders and orders whenever any maintenance work is due.

Timing is what differentiate preventive maintenance from the reactive one. The latter intervenes only when a failure occurs or when a piece of equipment stops working and the repair must be run as soon as possible. While using PMMS, corrective actions are taken before any mechanical breakdown.

The business objectives of preventive maintenance can be summarized with the improvement of resource management. The equipment is more reliable and maintenance costs are reduced thanks to a schedule that also involves human work.

Nowadays, companies have the chance to adopt computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) in order to make maintenance a regular and frequent operation. It helps with the management of scheduled repairs and avoids stalled production whenever maintenance is planned.

Technological innovation could also come in support of CMMS, thanks to AI and IoT systems that remotely monitor machines and inspections in a smarter way.

There are four different models of preventive maintenance that could apply to separate operations or corporate organizational systems.

1.  Usage-based preventive maintenance is based on the actual usage of the machine or asset. To forecast inspections, it takes into account the utilization time and environmental conditions.
2. Calendar/time-based preventive maintenance occurs on a calendar interval, so planning the due date is only based on recurring events.
3. Predictive maintenance happens before a failure occurs. The corrective maintenance is set when specific conditions of the equipment are registered by the team.
4. Prescriptive maintenance predicts when failures are going to happen and also why it’s happening. It helps analyze scenarios and potential outcomes to evaluate in order to reduce the risks.