We use preventive maintenance for the majority of our equipment. With older used equipment in our plant, it is necessary to keep up with it. But, being a team of 2 full time and 1 part time maintenance department, we don’t have enough man hours to fulfill all the necessary PMs. We implemented a policy where the daily maintenance is done by the operators when able. If there is something out of their capability, maintenance is there to complete it.

As far as how much of our time? We spend 50%-75% of our time on PM when able. There are weeks where that may drop well below 50%. Scheduled out in MaintainX we show way short on hours to complete the PM. That’s where OT eats into the budget. As manager, a large amount of my on-floor time is spent doing reactive. Our largest challenge is the older equipment. And that almost always has a higher reactive maintenance percentage.

Walking into a facility 3 years ago that did only necessary maintenance this is a hot topic for us. With more than a decade of only having what had to happen get done we hit the ground running instituting a preventive maintenance policy. While it has taken three years to get this done, we are now beginning to see results that are positive. Constantly “putting out fires” is exhausting. due to the preventive maintenance that we have instituted and scheduled the fires have become less and less. Preventive maintenance is saving us money and boosting morale for the Team. Highly recommend

Implementing a preventive maintenance (PM) schedule can be challenging, particularly in production environments where there is a constant pressure to keep operations running without interruptions. Many organizations struggle with the notion that there is never a suitable time to halt production for maintenance task, often prioritizing immediate output over long-term reliability. This issue is exacerbated when dealing with obsolete and older machines that require more meticulous care and attention, as their wear and tear necessitate frequent upkeep to prevent unexpected failures. Additionally, being short-staffed and lacking experienced technicians complicates the situation, as there may not be enough personnel to perform the required maintenance effectively or to train less experienced staff. Inexperienced management in production further exasperates the problem as they may not fully understand the importance of preventive maintenance or may struggle to balance maintenance needs with production demands. Also another struggle is “we have been doing it this way for years”  or “ we haven't had any of these issues before” can hinder the adoption of PM scheduling leading  the resistance of new practices despite the potential benefits. This will result in more reactive work orders than preventive work being performed. 

Last year between October to December we created 3,599 work orders, of which  2,798 were repeat orders, resulting in a repeat ratio 77.7%. This year we have issued 6,989 work orders, with 6,129 of them being repeating which gives a repeat ratio of 87.7%. 

I believe that improving communication and alignment between our operators, production management and maintenance teams could help the issue with machine/equipment neglect.

We spend very little time on traditional preventative maintenance as in fixing or shoring something up that isn’t broken yet.  We are a small facilities maintenance team that oversees multiple commercial properties.  I’d say 95% if not more is reactive maintenance.  But that’s just the nature of what we do.  We don’t have a lot of equipment that needs maintaining, the majority of our equipment is hand and power tools and our box truck.  Now we obviously try to keep up with our preventative maintenance on our truck like everyone does but other than that the only real preventative maintenance we regularly implement is changing air conditioning filters and making sure pool and fountain water is filled enough to prevent burning out pumps, and oil changes on our blowers and pressure washers.  Other than that we are constantly responding to new work orders from staff and tenants

It seems to me that in our situation it would not be beneficial to increase preventative maintenance just for the sake of increasing it as it would take away valuable time from the important and often time sensitive repairs needing to be made at our different properties.  Long story short (too late) we respond to what needs fixing and perform preventative maintenance when we have time between our main work orders; and it seems to work out pretty well for us.  

We have spent the last year in MaintainX. We currently sit at 92% preventative maintenance. Many work orders on this statistic also includes inspections. We have found these inspections insightful and allow us to plan prior to receiving a reactive work order. We set these inspections up as a pass, flag, fail option. This then generates reactive work orders for us to keep on our radar and escalate as needed.

The only thing holding us back is machine availability. As we progress we get a greater level of understanding for the time required. Once we have this we can schedule this with our production team much better..

I am new to maintenance management. My expertise has been in the installation and repairs. I didn’t realize the skills gap until I started to manage maintenance. I had a hard time managing the tasks when I was the only one who could do the repair. When I was repairing, there was no management, mechanics took initiative, but just made small problems worse because they didn’t know better. I accidently found Maintain x in the process of doing research on the maintenance process. This opened the door to a world of knowledge.

 It's not a matter of skills. I have a team of very competent people that have the capacity to do what needs to be done. It's a matter of documentation. I have been through a lot of good people that ultimately quit because the equipment got the best of them. The same problems over and over. Back and forth blaming each other. We lose too much knowledge when people quit.

Since we started using this program, we have been able to learn from our mistakes, improve our process, and the knowledge doesn't get lost. It evolves into simple inspection checks based on the easy to access history from all who participated.

This enabled us to focus on the failures that already happened, document what went wrong and how it was corrected, make a plan to prevent the same failure, then everyone involved can discuss improving the process.

Software like this is going to bridge the gap and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when I start telling these techs that I want to see them on their phones more!