How Well Your Preventive Maintenance Tasks Support Your Asset Care Strategy

Effective asset care is essential for maintaining equipment availability, supporting production schedules, sustaining process flows, and meeting environmental, health, safety, and regulatory obligations.

Asset care involves implementing the most cost‑effective control strategy tailored to an asset’s dominant failure modes and operating envelope. The goal is to maximize utilization while minimizing life‑cycle costs and ensuring the asset reaches its budgeted end‑of‑life.

Asset care can take many forms—operator‑led tasks, predictive analytics, preventive maintenance plans, or even a run‑to‑failure approach. An effective care strategy emerges from an engineered system that integrates business processes, a clear RASI matrix, and a properly configured management information system (e.g., Maximo, SAP) to sustain performance.

Unfortunately, many preventive maintenance tasks are drafted without sufficient detail to capture quantitative equipment history, and they often ignore specific failure modes.

The remedy lies in adopting Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO). By crafting procedures that add value, cover all necessary actions, are repeatable, well organized, and define precise duration and interval, you can elevate maintenance effectiveness.

Well‑designed preventive maintenance procedures enhance equipment reliability and improve failure predictability.

Here are a few critical success factors to help you evaluate the preventive maintenance tasks in your current maintenance program:

Value‑Added: Each task must contain clear acceptance criteria and a method for defining acceptable performance. Incorporate measurements or meter points to collect data that can be trended, enabling timely shift to condition‑based maintenance. The outcome is an extended useful life at the lowest operating costs. When personnel recognize the value, they are more likely to execute the task consistently and effectively.

Comprehensive: Preventive maintenance tasks should cover periodic calibration of critical components to keep the entire system operating near perfect accuracy. They must also include regular adjustments of clearances, drive‑belt tension, and other power‑transmission elements. Since many parts—belts, gaskets, seals—have finite lifespans, the tasks must specify scheduled replacement.

Repeatable: Tasks should be written so that any qualified technician can perform them identically and achieve the same results. Definitions must be thorough, providing all details necessary for effective execution. Organize tasks for quick identification, and include comprehensive disassembly/reassembly instructions, along with drawings, photographs, or other visual aids.

Organized: Preventive maintenance typically involves a series of tasks that need to be completed swiftly to reduce downtime. Arrange tasks in a logical order that supports efficient execution, and align all supporting data—task lists, drawings, specification sheets—with the corresponding activities.

Duration: Each task must have an accurate mean time to perform. Time estimates should be verified through direct supervisor observation and refined during planning and scheduling. Consistent supervision during preventive maintenance ensures that the allotted time is utilized efficiently and that tasks are completed successfully.

Interval: The task frequency should align with the OEM’s recommendations until enough data—work‑order history, industry benchmarks—provides a clearer understanding of failure likelihood. The optimal interval emerges from analyzing breakdowns, trouble‑call records, and correct maintenance history.

When all these elements are embedded in your preventive maintenance tasks, your asset care strategy gains the robust infrastructure needed for continuous improvement. The result is maximized asset utilization, the lowest total cost of ownership, and higher equipment uptime, greater production output, and reduced labor and material expenses.

If most of your preventive maintenance tasks fall short of these criteria, it may be time to reassess the underlying business processes, RASI matrix, and management information systems that underpin your asset care program.

This article appeared in the June edition of Life Cycle Engineering’s RxToday newsletter.

About the Author:
Jeff Jones is a seasoned reliability technician and master training specialist at Life Cycle Engineering. With over 23 years of experience in maintenance and reliability, Jeff specializes in boilers, HVAC systems, hydraulics, compressed air, and other mechanical distributive equipment. He has led mechanical integrity programs, rotating equipment initiatives, hierarchy development, criticality analysis, simplified failure‑mode and effect analysis (SFMEA), equipment maintenance planning, and job‑plan optimization. Contact Jeff at jjones@LCE.com.