Simple Maintenance Program Types



You need to understand the fundamentals of maintenance whether you own a car, house, building, or work in the operation and maintenance of machines professionally.


You may already be performing some types of maintenance, but you should always review your strategy to keep your assets in good condition for the least amount of money.


Instead of being limited to "the restoration of any item to function once it has failed," maintenance now encompasses a wider range of activities.


This article discusses the fundamental maintenance categories with a particular emphasis on the following aspects about maintenance programmes.


  • service description
  • the maintenance goals
  • How maintenance is done
  • various maintenance initiatives
  • Program comparisons for maintenance


service description


According to the British Standard Glossary (3811:1993), maintenance is:

"The synthesis of all technical and administrative measures, including supervisory measures, aimed to maintain or restore an object to a condition in which it can carry out a specified function"

"Maintenance is a set of coordinated tasks performed to maintain an item in its best operational condition with minimal cost acquired."

Maintenance generally refers to holding a building, machine, or other structure up to a standard that is considered acceptable.

Goals of the Maintenance Program

  • maximising output or improving facility accessibility at the lowest possible cost while maintaining the highest levels of quality and safety.
  • lowering emergencies and breakdowns.
  • maximising the use of resources.
  • Reducing downtime.
  • control of the spare parts inventory.
  • enhancing machinery performance and lowering the scrap rate.
  • reducing energy consumption.
  • maximising equipment's useful life.
  • delivering trustworthy cost and financial control.
  • locating and putting cost-cutting measures in place.
Programs for Maintenance: Types

In many places of the world, various maintenance techniques are used.

The resources of the organisation or corporation have a major impact on the adoption of a certain Maintenance type.

Each professional must consider the available resources before deciding "which maintenance type is ideal for his plant" because one maintenance strategy may be less expensive than another.

various maintenance strategies

1. Maintenance that is either reactive or corrective

The "run it till it breaks" maintenance technique is essentially reactive maintenance. The equipment is not maintained in the way the original designer intended to guarantee that the design life is reached.
Reactive maintenance benefits have a few drawbacks as well. When working with fresh equipment, we can anticipate few failure situations. If we only undertake reactive maintenance, we won't spend any money on capital projects or labour until 
something breaks.

Reactive maintenance benefits

  • low price.
  • lower staff.
  • Reactive maintenance's drawbacks
  • cost increase brought on by unplanned equipment downtime.

  • a rise in labour costs, particularly if overtime is required.
  • Costs associated with equipment maintenance or replacement.
  • Damage to additional equipment or the process due to equipment failure.
  • ineffective staff resource use




2. Regular Maintenance

According to the definition of preventive maintenance, it is "actions carried out on a time- or machine-run-based schedule that detect, prevent, or mitigate degradation of a component or system with the aim of maintaining or extending its useful life by controlling degradation to an acceptable level."

The frequency of preventive maintenance may depend on the machine's operation hours or be determined by the maintenance engineer or advised by the machine's vendor.

Preventive maintenance benefits
  • Many capital-intensive procedures are economical.
  • The maintenance schedule can be modified with flexibility.
  • prolonged component life.
  • savings in energy.
  • failure of the process or reduced equipment.
  • estimated cost reduction of 12% to 18% compared to reactive maintenance programme.
  • Preventive maintenance drawbacks
  • Catastrophic failures are still possible.
  • arduous in effort.
  • includes the carrying out of unnecessary maintenance.
  • Possibility of inadvertent component damage when doing unnecessary maintenance.
 3. Predictive Maintenance


The definition of predictive maintenance is as follows: Measurements that can identify the beginning of a degradation mechanism, allowing the causing stressors to be removed or regulated before the component's physical state significantly deteriorates. Results show functional capabilities for the present and the future. Predictive maintenance, as opposed to preventive maintenance, bases the requirement for repair on the actual state of the machine rather than on a predetermined schedule. Preventive maintenance is time-based, as you may remember. Time, such as calendar time or equipment run time, is the basis for tasks like changing lubricant.

For instance, the majority of people replace the oil in their cars every 3,000 to 5,000 miles. This basically bases the frequency of oil changes on how often the device is used. The oil's real state and performance capacity are not taken into consideration. Time has caused it to change.



This approach may be compared to performing preventive maintenance. On the other hand, if the car's owner discounted the amount of time the vehicle had been in operation and had the oil periodically examined to establish its true state and lubricating qualities, he or she might be able to delay the oil change until the car had logged 10,000 miles. Predictive maintenance and preventative maintenance vary fundamentally in this way.whereby quantified material/equipment condition is used to define needed maintenance tasks based on predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance has various benefits.

The likelihood of catastrophic equipment breakdowns is almost entirely eliminated by a well-planned predictive maintenance programme. We will be able to plan maintenance tasks to reduce or eliminate overtime expenses. To fulfil the downstream maintenance requirements, we will be able to order parts as needed well in advance and reduce our inventory as much as possible. We can make the equipment run more efficiently, reducing energy costs and boosting plant dependability.

benefits of preventative maintenance

  • increased component availability and operating life.
  • enables preventative corrective measures.
  • less downtime for the process or the equipment.
  • decrease in the price of labour and parts.
  • improved product calibre.
  • enhanced environmental and worker safety.
  • increased employee morale
  • savings in energy.
  • estimated cost reduction of 8% to 12% compared to preventive maintenance programme.
Predictive maintenance's drawbacks

increased spending on diagnostic tools
increased spending on staff education.
Management is not always aware of savings potential.

4. Preventive upkeep

Pro-active maintenance, which employs a number of technologies to increase the operational lifespan of equipment and essentially eliminate reactive maintenance, is the most recent advancement in the field of predictive maintenance.

A proactive program's main component is root cause failure analysis, which identifies the methods and reasons of equipment malfunctions. Thus, it is possible to address the root causes of machine problems and gradually engineer the failure mechanisms out of every equipment installation. The labour tasks derived from routine preventive and predictive maintenance activities are included.

standard maintenance procedures

It has long been understood that imbalance and misalignment are the main reasons why most machine malfunctions occur. Both of these situations subject bearings to excessive forces that reduce their useful lifespan. A much better course of action is to precisely balance and align the troublesome machine rather than continuously replacing damaged bearings, and to confirm the findings by meticulous vibration signature analysis.

The advantage of proactive maintenance programmes over the other maintenance kinds is that they combine the benefits of reactive maintenance, preventive maintenance, and predictive maintenance programmes.

Although it primarily shares these drawbacks with preventative maintenance programmes.

proactive versus predictive maintenance

  • Predictive maintenance uses sensors, measuring devices, and other technologies to ascertain a machine's status.
  • Example: Assume that a fan had an irregular vibration that was discovered by sensing equipment (such as a vibrometer), and that we responded to the call to fix the fan's current issue. However, with proactive maintenance, we look for the root of the issue, which could be a design issue, a weather issue, an operation issue, etc., in order to address the real issue.









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