Planned maintenance: what are the advantages?

Planned maintenance encompasses all the activities set for a given asset. Discover the main types and what benefits it offers

The management and maintenance phase of an asset represents the living phase of the work, the phase in which the asset is actually used. The approaches to this delicate phase of the asset’s life cycle are varied; among these, we find planned maintenance that is based on precise and timely planning of maintenance interventions.

This kind of task can be difficult and time-consuming, so using the right facility management software can help you plan all maintenance operations correctly and help prevent problems from arising. But first, let’s discover together the various types of planned maintenance and what advantages it offers!

What is Planned Maintenance?

Planned maintenance is a type of proactive maintenance.

Carrying out planned maintenance on your asset means planning maintenance interventions in order to prevent the occurrence of problems and malfunctions and therefore means minimising time and costs associated with repairing damages caused by faults.

Planned maintenance is based on the principle of prioritisation of work and regular and planned inspections. This takes into account the type of asset, the construction techniques, the materials used and the systems installed. It is therefore possible to maintain asset functionality throughout its life cycle, avoiding, within certain limits, failures and malfunctions for which an urgent and even more expensive repair intervention would be necessary.

What is the difference between planned maintenance and preventive maintenance?

Although the two terms “planned” and “preventive” seem to have the same meaning and indicate the same type of maintenance, there is a slight difference:

• planned maintenance indicates a strategy in which maintenance activities are planned and performed before the failure occurs;
• preventive maintenance is a more specific form of planned maintenance and refers to programmable and executable maintenance activities while an activity is still in operation to prevent an unforeseen failure from occurring as a result of a potential problem identified.

What are the 4 types of planned maintenance?

The 4 types of planned maintenance are:

1. Corrective maintenance maintenance: consists of intervening to correct problems detected during planned maintenance;
2. Preventive maintenance: can follow three approaches:
   • Time-based: uses inspections at regular intervals to identify maintenance needs;
   • Usage-based: performed according to the reference parameters related to the use of the equipment, such as operating hours or number of production cycles;
   • Condition-based: this type of approach involves the collaboration of stakeholders to monitor assets and determine maintenance needs;
3. Risk-based maintenance: this type of maintenance involves the identification and analysis of the risk associated with the occurrence of any faults to determine maintenance priorities;
4. Predictive maintenance: The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has added a new dimension to maintenance planning. The data collected from IoT devices allows facility managers and maintenance staff to identify problems first and resolve them more efficiently.

4 types of planned maintenance

The 5 advantages of planned maintenance

The advantages of planned maintenance are due precisely to the ability to carry out maintenance on the asset and its parts, avoiding the occurrence of failures and therefore of damage resulting from the failure itself.

Imagine carrying out periodic planned inspections on the HVAC system of an office building: this allows us to keep the system always functioning and performing and guarantee the right environmental comfort to users. On the contrary, without planned maintenance, the system is subject to unforeseen failures and the repair of which would cause interruption of service to users with consequent damage in terms of environmental comfort and costs.

It is therefore clear that for an efficient management of assets it is necessary to plan maintenance interventions. In fact, we can identify 5 main advantages of planned maintenance:

1. Increased safety at work: preventing faults to the various parts of the building, to the equipment and to the systems that compose it, guarantees greater safety for those who live or work inside the building and for the maintenance workers themselves.
2. More rapid maintenance activities: the fact of having already planned the various activities and consequently already having the details of the operations to be carried out as well as all the materials and equipment already ordered and ready for use, involves a greater initial investment, in the planning phase, but maintenance activities then much faster and more precise.
3. Extension of the useful life of the asset: a plant that is constantly controlled and maintained to its highest standards will certainly be more efficient and will certainly have a longer useful life than a plant that has been subject to damage and then repaired.
4. Reduce maintenance costs: keeping a plant, equipment or the structure of a building operational involves a certain economic investment, while having to face a repair, to damage already manifested, provides for far greater costs.
5. Improved time management: planning and respecting the maintenance schedule done, means working in an orderly manner and without wasting time. Lack of planning would result in delays caused by multiple factors such as material still to be ordered or design of repairs that clearly require time to perform.

The benefits of planned maintenance

How to implement planned maintenance

No asset will ever be perfectly the same as another and consequently even with regard to maintenance there will never be a single way to implement it. However, there are a few steps that maintenance teams can consider to achieve efficient and effective planned maintenance. Let’s see what they are:

• Organize your assets well: analyzing the criticality of the assets to be managed helps to identify which planned maintenance approach is necessary and to organize the maintenance planning work itself.
• Team Strategy training: Planned maintenance requires the entire team to participate and be aware of their responsibilities. It’s also essential to ensure that everyone is trained on new technologies, processes and procedures. When all team members know their role within the planned maintenance strategy and the resources at their disposal, the implementation is much easier and more effective.
• Planned maintenance checklist: once planned maintenance has been introduced, it is useful to monitor whether the strategy applied is paying off. To do this, you can use planned maintenance checklists that help monitor the KPIs for facility management, that is, those indicators that provide data and information on the status of the structures they manage.
• Use of software for maintenance: as often happens, technology is a great resource to make work faster but above all more efficient and effective. Also in this case the use of specific software is essential for a good implementation of planned maintenance.

Facility maintenance is a very delicate phase that must be addressed in a precise and timely manner to ensure that the asset lasts throughout its life cycle with the same functions with which it was designed.

To better address this task, I would strongly recommend using a professional facility management software that allows you not only to implement planned maintenance in your everyday work, but also track activities and manage problems, all in a single platform.