Preventive Maintainance

Preventive Maintenance, V/s Breakdown Maintenance.

Breakdown versus Preventive Maintenance, this is the dilemma of every auditor when visiting the maintenance department:

Breakdown maintenance is when the organization only conducts maintenance on a piece of equipment when the equipment breaks down.

Preventive, and even predictive maintenance, is when an organization conducts maintenance activities, including inspections, to help ensure equipment is functioning within their expected parameters and to catch indications of minor issues, so that they can be addressed before a bigger problem occurs.

The fall out from a BREAKDOWN can be multiple:

o QUALITY – production stops, resulting in delays in the delivery of the product or service, damage of the product.

o Health and Safety – the method of breakdown could be catastrophic causing injury to employees in the vicinity; for example: natural gas leak causing an explosion.

o Regulatory – if this is equipment that is legally required and then is no longer operating; for example: stack scrubbers required by a certificate of approval for air, light curtains required to protect working entrapment.

Prenentive v/s breakdown

Ultimately, there is no specific requirement in any of the standards for requiring preventive maintenance. Sometimes, as an auditor, there is a legal requirement for preventive maintenance on equipment, but not as many as would be expected. Something to consider is the posting I observed on a Maintenance Supervisor’s wall during an audit recently, which inspired this blog entry:

“Maintenance is not about fixing things that break. Maintenance is about preserving, protecting, safeguarding and looking after the very machines that make business possible.”

The term ‘maintenance’ means to keep the equipment in operational condition or repair it to its operational mode. Main objective of the maintenance is to have increased availability of production systems,...