Understanding the Impact of Preventive Maintenance

Key to any manufacturing operation is the "care and feeling" of its production equiptment. In theory, an effective preventive maintenance (PM) program will preclude any majore problems with the equiptment and will allow producers to maximize output, minimize cost and assure on-going quality of the parts being produced. In reality, PM schedules are a combination of the machine/tool supplier's recommendations and any modifications required to reflect the "real-world" requirements of cost, quantity and quality. Considerations include:

if you PM too frequently, quantity goes down and cost goes up unnecessarily (machines are precluded from production while production parts and operators sit idle, maintenance workers could be doing something more productive, spare parts are used up prematurely, etc.).

if you PM too infrequently, quality and quantity go down and cost goes up unnecessarily (machines run past optimal PM may begin to produce marginal or scrap parts or cause emergency maintenance situations which typicall take longer to fix than planned maintenance, etc.). The challange/problem is to plan the PM frequency for minimal impact on quality, quantity and cost.

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