What is planned maintenance?
Planned maintenance (aka scheduled or preventive maintenance) is a proactive strategy where maintenance and inspections of assets are scheduled at regular, appropriate intervals to ensure that assets are operating properly thus minimizing breakdowns, downtime and repairs.
What is demand maintenance?
On the other hand, demand maintenance (sometimes referred as corrective maintenance) is a reactive strategy where repairs are performed at the point when assets are failing. This can be a costly approach due to unplanned downtime, damaged machinery, overtime expense and callouts. Ideally this method should only be performed on assets where parts are inexpensive and easy to replace.
What’s the right mix for Public Works?
Public Works departments will always have demand maintenance issues to contend with and while most recognize the benefits of adopting a planned maintenance approach, it can be hard to implement. As such, many organizations rely heavily on a reactive maintenance strategy which often results in poor planning, reduced asset life, and overall inefficiency. Finding the right balance between planned and demand maintenance is key to maximizing productivity and asset life while reducing costs. Experts suggest that the optimal mix is 25% demand and 75% planned maintenance.
Advantages of Planned Maintenance
Planned maintenance is intended to improve asset life and avoid unnecessary, unplanned maintenance events. Some key benefits to adopting a planned maintenance program are.
- Extend the useful life of assets by decreasing the need for premature replacements.
- Enhance the efficiency of equipment and reduce energy costs.
- Reduce overtime costs by working on a scheduled basis versus a reactive basis.
- Improve budget control by sourcing of spare parts and labor more economically in advance.
- Decrease the number of large-scale repairs through regular and routine maintenance.
- Minimize disruption to schedules as planned maintenance work can be fit in during downtime and slow periods.
- Increase the levels of citizen satisfaction.
- Improve analysis and reporting to help determine new maintenance strategies.
How PubWorks Helps
Many organizations are still reliant on inefficient, paper-based processes or spreadsheets for information tracking. To advance toward best management practice, it is crucial to have a robust, user-friendly system in place that delivers the functionality required to improve performance for both planned and demand maintenance. With no easy-to-access or accurate means to measure the cost of maintenance, asset performance history and trends in repairs, it is impossible to establish a more efficient process to tackle both planned and demand maintenance. PubWorks helps by providing easy-to-use processes for all work management and full visibility with extensive and flexible reporting.
