Routine maintenance tasks are small and simple in nature and require only basic maintenance skills to work well. They can be completed daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Companies that invest in routine maintenance can extend the useful life of their assets, reduce emergency maintenance, and keep their production lines or facilities running more consistently. Default maintenance is simply following the manufacturer's recommendations for maintenance, including when to perform inspections and maintenance.
In addition, routine maintenance can be scheduled on a daily basis, allowing the company to maximize the use of its maintenance resources. To ensure that routine maintenance is adequate, it is important to create a comprehensive maintenance checklist for each piece of equipment or machinery that requires routine maintenance and research the industry standard for lubricating, replacing, or cleaning. With a little joint effort from your maintenance team and the help of the right CMMS, you can have an equipment maintenance program valid in less than a month. Therefore, routine maintenance can be performed by personnel outside the maintenance department, such as machine operators.
The planned maintenance schedule for an installation may include scheduling, but sometimes the scheduling is done separately through a maintenance scheduler. As such, the maintenance schedule should provide a clear overview of all incoming and ongoing maintenance work. In a nutshell, planned maintenance details how and what work will be completed; scheduled maintenance determines who will complete the work and when it will be completed. Any non-emergency maintenance task that is performed without first planning is called “effortless maintenance” (also known as minor maintenance).
Technicians should be able to read and understand the maintenance plan and have the necessary knowledge to follow the described maintenance procedures. While planned maintenance and scheduled maintenance seem the same, there are some essential differences between them. In most cases, maintenance teams will want to minimize the amount of emergency maintenance needed on their facilities. In addition, most maintenance technicians assigned to perform routine inspections, cleanings, or adjustments are entry-level or relatively new to a particular maintenance department. Routine maintenance is a simple and easy to implement method to improve overall maintenance.
We will describe the most popular maintenance strategies, including assigning tasks to specific people, making sure the job runs correctly, analyzing problems and deciding how to prevent them from happening again. We will also discuss the unique objectives and benefits of each strategy as well as how to set up a cost-effective equipment maintenance program.
