Tuesday 15 September 2020

Choose preventive maintenance rather than corrective maintenance to prevent incidents


Preventive maintenance (or preventative maintenance) is an important hazard control in the workplace that prevents injuries. As per OSHA, employers are required to implement a preventive-maintenance system that ensures safety equipment remains effective and lessen the likelihood of it failing.

Equipment failures cannot be eliminated they are often resulted. However, preventive maintenance systems can reduce breakdowns, ensure employees safety, and even save millions in costs. 


Unlike preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance awaits for small problems to become big problem before doing anything about them. A corrective maintenance system never inspects equipment or a machine until it breaks down or notice any malfunction of a particular part and lacks maintenance procedures. Most organizations spend 80 percent of their technician’s time working on corrective maintenance issues rather than performing preventive procedures.



Most accidents are often caused by small, preventable oversights. Typically, an organization’s most devastating accidents, operational losses, and production setbacks are caused by maintenance systems and internal communication failures.


There are a number of accidents, where improper maintenance was one major contributory cause towards disaster. Examples of these from the process industries are the leak from a chemical plant at Bhopal, India in 1984. To learn from the past it is necessary to investigate incidents and accidents. Both maintenance personnel and managers need to understand why maintenance errors occur, and how the risk of error can be managed

A preventive maintenance system requires inspection of important components to ensure they are working properly. For example, the tires or hydraulic cylinders on a forklift should be inspected for adherence to performance standards because a failure of either of these components during an attempted lift may cause the forklift to fail and lead to an injury.


Regular equipment maintenance is essential to keeping it safe, reliable, and in working order. Inadequate maintenance can cause accidents, health issues, and other dangerous problems. Maintenance is crucial for creating products of high quality and ensuring continuous productivity.

Regular maintenance eliminates workplace hazards and provides a safer and healthier work environment. Maintenance tasks may include the following:


Functions of the preventive maintenance programme


1. Inspection or checkups.

2. Lubrication.

3. Planning and scheduling.

4. Records and analysis.

5. Training of maintenance staff.

6. Storage of spare parts.

Preventive Maintenance (PM) is planned maintenance that prolongs the lifespan of industrial assets, equipment, and infrastructure also known as preventative maintenance. Preventive Maintenance includes adjustments cleaning, lubrication, repairs, and replacements. 


Preventive maintenance always has three components: 

1.    It’s systematic

2.    It’s performed routinely

3.    It’s aimed at reducing or minimizing failures

The goal of preventative maintenance is always to minimize failures by detecting and fixing them systematically before they lead to bigger problems. Think of it as proactive maintenance. If it’s not done routinely and on time, it won’t be preventive in nature but it will be reactive.

For example, bearings have a certain life, and they need to be replaced after they have operated for a specified number of hours. You have to check bearings regularly to ensure they don’t need replacement. It’s such simple.


Preventive Maintenance may be seen as the maintenance carried out at predetermined intervals or according to prescribed criteria, intended to reduce the probability of failure or the degradation of the functioning of an item .This means that maintenance is performed before a failure is developed. Preventive Maintenance can be done at predetermined intervals. Corrective Maintenance is the maintenance carried out after fault recognition, intended to bring back an item into a state in which it can perform a required function. This means that maintenance is performed after the fault of an item has been detected, in order to restore the item.




Condition based maintenance is also used along with preventive maintenance. In this system, health of the equip­ment is regularly monitored and recorded in the form of mechanical vibrations, noise, acoustic, thermal emissions; changes in chemical compositions, smell, pressure, relative displacement etc. This helps in diagnosis and detection of faults, if any.


Condition monitoring can be applied in following three ways:

(a) Qualitative checks based on look, sound and feel, through simple inspection.

(b) Condition checking by measuring some parameters regularly.

(c) Trend monitoring by making measurements and plotting them in order to detect gradual departure from a norm.


Advantages of Preventive Maintenance:


Operator and machine safety

By performing a regular preventive maintenance, you are assured your equipment remains to operate under safe conditions, both for the machine and the operators. Possible issues can be nipped in the but before they have a chance to cause harm.

Machine efficiency

Normal wear and tear can result in lower machine efficiency. Preventive maintenance assures optimal working conditions and conserves the life span of the equipment.

Time savings

A planned preventive maintenance may cause small hindrance for production, but that is nothing compared to actual downtime caused by a breakdown. Because it is planned, production can propose the optimal time and can factor in the nuisance. Preventative maintenance procedures take less time than emergency repairs and replacements.


Implementing preventive maintenance program

Implementing regular maintenance on essential industrial assets can also go a long way in ensuring equipment can handle the day’s tasks without unexpected malfunctions. For maintenance to be an effective however, it must be done as a preventive measure, not a reactive course of action.


Creating a schedule of planned maintenance for each and every asset in your facility can keep your system running with few interruptions due to equipment malfunctions. Regular preventive maintenance allows service professionals identify the beginnings of potential problems before they cause equipment slowdowns or shutdowns.


Maintenance aims at maintaining or reestablishing a good in a specified condition, which also concerns the safety necessary to the proper functioning of the machine. Maintenance does not only ensure the proper functioning of the good, but can also guarantee the safety of the operators.


To sum up, although the aim of maintenance is to ensure the productivity and efficiency of technical systems. Improper maintenance and incorrectly performed maintenance or lack of suitable maintenance activities, contributes to deterioration and, even more seriously, cause incidents and accidents.




Article by Dr.Yashoda Tammineni,
MSc, Ph.D.
HSE, HOD at NIFS

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