True Preventative Maintenance

True Preventative Maintenance (TPM)

What is preventative / preventive maintenance?

By definition Preventative Maintenance is method of conducting repairs by outside or in-house maintenance personnel with the sole purpose of maintaining equipment in safe operating condition by providing a systematic plan involving detection of defects through use of inspections that also include adjustments, lubrication, cleaning, minor repairs and resetting of parts or components to manufacturers original specifications. By utilizing the inspection information to preform planned repairs to prevent further failures from occurring. 

The Problem with the Preventative Maintenance Term (PM)

The Problem with the Preventative Maintenance term is that in the real world especially in the world of maintenance service providers and the service repair industry, maintenance contractors don't practice what they preach necessarily. 

What I really mean by this is that service providers will promise to provide an inspection that will include small maintenance, repairs, adjustments, cleaning, lubrication, etc... but often don't actually execute this "prevention" portion of the work!  Often times it is intentional not to address the items during inspection so that the anticipated break downs will occur, thus benefiting the service company for billable hours, parts and business opportunities for the service companies to keep the cash machine rolling.

Disagree?  Some equipment owners might disagree with what I just said but ask youreself this one question:  "Is the same company that performs the inspections also doing the service work after the inspections?  Then here lies the problem.

80-90% of the service providers who perform the inspections are awarded the repair work after the inspections are finished.  As a former sales representative for overhead crane service providers who was told to go mainly after the inspection business opportunities so that the service company can look for other repairs to do, I always felt that it was a direct conflict of interest.  In fact some service providers will give the inspections away on cost but make it up on the repairs later.  This is not how preventative maintenance should be used against the equipment owners. 

True Preventative Maintenance is Trackable and Monitored Maintenance

The only way to ensure that you as an equipment owner will get the best dollar value for the repairs on your equipment is to keep track of all maintenance records for starters.  This extremely valuable information is what the service companies use to identify short term problems, medium term problems and long term problems in order to plan for future service work.

Equipment owner must also understand, learn and be open minded enough to see that there is ways to control maintenance better and that is with a sound Maintenance Optimization Strategy

Know and Understand the Maintenance Service Industry

In this day and age the more successful companies that own overhead cranes, hoists, fork-lifting equipment and many other Material Handling Equipment (MHE) types will learn, adapt and implement methods to beat "the grip the service providers have" on information control as it relates to maintenance.  

 The better you keep track and understand your maintenance the less likely your service provider will be able to hide information and keep you in the dark when it comes to preventative maintenance issues.

What Equipment Manufacturers and Service Companies are saying?

After I spent years in business, promoting and presented my philosophy and software products like  MHEControl.com to various companies many overhead crane manufacturers and service providers have said to me:

 "Bill we count on our customers to have break downs that's how we make money!"

This notion of allowing equipment owners to have anticipated or expected break downs so that service companies can simply make more money is totally unacceptable! 

Inclosing there would be no need for writing this article in the first place if the service industry would hold true to what they said and delivered a preventative maintenance promises and better yet there would be no need to come up with another term to define something that is more accurate or having a more truthful term such as "True Preventative Maintenance."

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Article by:  Bill Hallett, President and expert in Overhead Cranes.

MHE Control Systems and Crane Parts Depot

Bill specializes in implemention of true preventative maintenance programs for crane owners and is also  an overhead crane maintenance and parts specialist for over 16 years.  Bill has also created his very own Maintenance Optimization software for overhead cranes called:MHEControl