3 Advantages of Automation in Preventive Maintenance

Discover three advantages to automating preventive maintenance

Your maintenance and reliability teams are made up of intelligent, competent and highly-qualified individuals. That means their time could be going to waste when it is spent on the clerical tasks that keep your preventive maintenance program going. 

The more automation you can introduce to your preventive maintenance (PM) plan, the less time your team will have to waste on keeping the wheels turning, leaving them free to complete work orders and get your assets running smoothly when you need them. This is to say nothing of the accuracy you could have with a good maintenance automation plan.

This goal — more and better automation powering a preventive maintenance plan — is achievable with the right plan of action and a modern enterprise asset management (EAM) or computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). While maintenance automation may not be available for plants with basic work order systems or maintenance reporting from spreadsheets, a modern EAM or CMMS can give you the inherent components necessary to make automation a reality.

Areas of improvement

The following areas are just a few ways that CMMS automation can impact maintenance:

1. Readings, calendars and more: When should an asset be maintained? When a certain amount of time has passed? Or perhaps based on PdM meter reading data — or a combination of the two factors? Whatever approach is best for a certain asset or piece of equipment, a CMMS with a high level of automation will allow you to mold your maintenance activities based on your processes and best practices. For example, you can generate a corrective work order based on certain reading thresholds of an asset; follow a workflow chain that mimics your organization’s sign-off authority; and automatically notify other relevant personnel when work is completed.
2. Intelligent adjustments: When there’s an adjustment in one part of a preventive maintenance schedule – like the quarterly PM date has changed – will all related PM procedures still carry over? The Stacking Groups feature of a modern CMMS can align these procedures, such as the PM user(s), work requested, parts, documents and EHS/safety programs, to simplify the creation of a comprehensive work order to include all of the tasks in each recurring procedure.
3. Optimizing workloads: Drag-and-drop Job Planners, a staple of a well-designed CMMS, make it easy to allocate workloads based on work requirements and worker availability. But the true benefit kicks in with the automatic calculation of the Mean Daily Utilization Percentage and Maximum Daily Utilization Percentage for each worker. The Mean Daily Utilization Percentage allows you to better understand the number of assigned work order hours versus hours available for the week; the Max Daily Utilization Percentage shows the number of hours scheduled on the heaviest workload day of the week, divided by the hours available. Using a combination of these factors, you can be better armed to plan work to maximize productivity.

Taking the next steps

For some organizations, preventive maintenance isn’t enough. Maintenance departments at these companies want to gain predictive capabilities, using asset-generated data to form even more accurate work order schedules. To reach this level, it will be necessary to look toward the integration capabilities of a modern CMMS. No matter the objective, effective maintenance today means having the right data configured the right way.

Automation as a data delivery tool is proving its worth in a number of important settings.

The efficiency gained can transform plants and be a key building block of future strategies.

Learn more about optimizing your operations by scheduling a personalized demo.