Preventive maintenance is a structured, planned approach to servicing equipment, production lines, and supporting assets before functional problems are observed. It aims to lower the likelihood, frequency, or impact of failures by carrying out predefined inspection, calibration, cleaning, adjustment, repair, or replacement tasks on a regular schedule or after a defined amount of use.
Typical elements of preventive maintenance in manufacturing include:
- Defining task lists and standard procedures for each asset or asset class
- Issuing and scheduling work orders based on time (e.g., weekly, monthly), usage (e.g., run hours, cycles), or other predefined triggers
- Coordinating maintenance windows with production plans to minimize unplanned downtime and disruption
- Documenting completed work, findings, and parts used for traceability, analysis, and regulatory records
- Updating next due dates, usage thresholds, or task lists based on observed equipment condition and history
In MES- and data-driven environments, preventive maintenance can be initiated or refined using operational data such as run hours, cycle counts, alarm histories, quality results, and basic condition checks. This helps align planned work with actual equipment usage and observed performance, while remaining distinct from predictive maintenance, which uses advanced analytics and modeling to anticipate specific failure modes.