Preventive Maintenance Software That Schedules Equipment & Building Maintenance Tasks
Preventive Maintenance Software provides integrated tools to analyse maintenance data and implement planned maintenance activities to reduce downtime and improve equipment reliability.
What Type of Preventive Maintenance Activities Do You Do?
What Is Preventive Maintenance Software?
Preventive Maintenance Software is a computerised application designed to provide maintenance managers and project managers with the tools to proactively track and manage maintenance activities for equipment, machinery, buildings, and other assets.
It allows maintenance teams to collect analytical data surrounding performance, breakdowns, and repairs, enabling them to set performance thresholds that help to quickly identify and prevent unplanned failures.
The objective of Preventive Maintenance Software is to promote a connected workforce and aid in the deployment of a planned maintenance strategy by providing features such as:
- Maintenance scheduling and calendar management
- Work order management and tracking
- Maintenance and equipment tracking
- Recordkeeping for equipment maintenance data
- Regular inspection management
- Preventive data analytics and maintenance reporting in custom dashboards
- Real-time alerts and notifications for planned maintenance tasks and equipment performance drops
Similar to a computerised maintenance management system, Preventive Maintenance Software prompts regular inspections, scheduled repairs, and routine maintenance to decrease the likelihood of unplanned equipment failures while extending the operation life of critical assets.
82% of companies experience unplanned downtime at least once every three years, meaning a preventive maintenance management plan should be a top priority for maintenance leaders.
Companies Experiencing Unplanned Downtime 2014-2017*
- 82%18%
*Outages lasted an average of 4 hours and cost an estimated $2 million (Vanson Bourne Study, 2017)
For businesses without a preventive approach to maintenance, equipment failure costs 10 times more in repairs and lost production than those with a strategy in place.
5 Best Preventive Maintenance Software Solutions For Maintenance Managers
IBM Maximo
The Product
Enterprise Maintenance Management Software for Simple and Complex Work Orders.
Ideal For
Organisations with 30+ Maintenance Engineers
Industry Fit
Manufacturing, Engineering, Chemicals, Energy, and Utilities
Pricing
From £131 per user per month
IFS
The Product
Maintenance Management System For Moderate To Complex Maintenance Programs.
Ideal For
Organisations with 50 to 20,000 Maintenance Engineers
Industry Fit
Aviation, Defence, Energy, Utilities, Engineering, Construction, and Manufacturing
Pricing
Available On Request
Maintenance Connection
The Product
A popular and comprehensive CMMS System for Small and Medium Business.
Ideal For
Organisations with 20 to 100 Maintenance Engineers
Industry Fit
Manufacturing, Facilities, Healthcare, and Government
Pricing
From £10,000
Ultimo
The Product
A comprehensive CMMS System for Simple and Complex Maintenance Management Requirements.
Ideal For
Organisations with 10+ Maintenance Engineers
Industry Fit
Manufacturing, Facilities, Healthcare, Government, Manufacturing, and Education
Pricing
From £35 per user per month
vx Maintain
The Product
Maintenance Management System For Complex Facilities.
Ideal For
Large Scale Retail Organisations with External Contractors
Industry Fit
Retail, Hospitality, Education, Healthcare, Utilities, and Manufacturing
Pricing
From £60 per unit per site
Why Maintenance Leaders Choose Preventive Strategies
80% of maintenance leaders view preventive maintenance as a top priority over Reactive and Predictive maintenance plans. Compared to other strategies, preventive maintenance is crucial for prolonging the life of assets.
Essentially, four signs signal to a maintenance manager that a preventive maintenance approach is needed:
- A rise in unavailable assets
- Delayed production schedules due to constant asset failure
- High emergency repair costs
- Increasing asset turnover rate of ageing equipment and infrastructure
Maintenance teams utilise a combination of time-based and condition-based maintenance that has proven effective, with regular inspections, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT), lubrication schedules, and parts replacements based on the manufacturer’s recommendations and real-time data from the equipment. This makes it appealing to asset-heavy industries such as oil and gas, utilities, healthcare, hospitality, and education.
When combined with software tools, PM plans will continue to become more beneficial and efficient for maintenance teams, as Dean Williamson explains in his Comparesoft Podcast (below).
Business-Value Benefits of Preventive Maintenance Software
Reduce High-Cost Unplanned Downtime
Through maintenance scheduling and inspection management, equipment uptime will increase. Preventive Maintenance Software can alert engineers to irregular performance drops, allowing them to check equipment before it unexpectedly fails, resulting in unplanned downtime.
Unplanned downtime can be detrimental to a business’s operating cash flow. It cost the automotive industry alone $22,000 every minute in 2015.
Fewer Emergency Breakdowns of Critical Equipment
The objective of Preventive Maintenance Software is to reduce the likelihood of equipment breakdowns. By having set schedules for changing lubricants, replacing bearings, and repairing moving parts during planned downtime, the possibility of asset breakdown is significantly reduced.
In the manufacturing industry, the cost of emergency breakdowns (in downtime and repairs) ranges between £200 an hour to £200,000 an hour.
Reactive maintenance – a maintenance strategy deployed to fix and repair an asset only when it has failed – has a 40% higher cost expectancy than preventive maintenance. This is due to high engineer call-out costs, a loss of production, and waiting on the purchase of spare parts.
Increase Equipment Availability
A preventive maintenance plan is designed to prolong the operational stage of an asset’s lifecycle, to keep equipment in optimal performance for longer. This allows for greater availability and limits the chances of production downtime.
78% of companies who implemented maintenance management software saw improvements in equipment life.
Lower Turnover Rate For Ageing Assets
With regular maintenance, an asset’s operation lifecycle stage is prolonged, meaning ageing equipment can run longer before needing to be replaced. This helps to reduce disposal and subsequent procurement costs to replace equipment on the production line.
Improved Safety Conditions In Facilities
30% of all manufacturing deaths are related to maintenance activities. Equipment and machinery that is regularly serviced will decrease the risk of employees working in unsafe environments. Regular checks also ensure equipment is kept up-to-date with safety codes and compliance standards.
Efficient Energy Management
A well-implemented PM program can contribute to energy savings by ensuring that equipment regularly operates at optimal efficiency and can help maintain compliance with regulatory standards.
Find Preventive Maintenance Software That Matches Your Equipment Uptime Requirements
What Type of Preventive Maintenance Activities Do You Do?
Risks Associated With Deploying a Preventive Maintenance Program
The primary challenge for implementing a preventive maintenance strategy is the initial investment in time and resources. This includes staff training, purchasing additional equipment, and the potential downtime required for maintenance activities.
Convincing leadership of the long-term cost savings and efficiency gains is a hurdle, as the benefits of PM are not always immediately visible.
Essentially, there are five key risk areas to be aware of:
- High Costs: There is a significant amount of equipment, time, and resources needed for a successful PM plan, which means high upfront costs.
- Excessive Maintenance: This is when PM plans are applied to assets of low value or priority in the production process and lead to overspending.
- Resource Planning: Resources such as spare parts need to be proactively ordered and stored to match planning schedules.
- Staff Training: Staff need to be trained and equipped to properly handle tasks and equipment, which requires money and time being spent on staff training.
- Time-Consuming: At first, deploying a PM plan will take up the majority of a maintenance team’s time, which can disturb other regular activities in the workplace.
How to Create a Preventive Maintenance Plan In 8 Steps
Step 1: Highlight End Goals
The key to understanding if preventive maintenance is right for you is to first highlight the goals you want to achieve. Do you want to:
- Reduce downtime
- Reduce repair costs
- Increase asset availability
- Improve inventory management
- Increase production rate
Step 2: Choose a Platform
You should now decide which format you’re going to use to achieve your maintenance goals. The top three methods for performing preventative maintenance management are pen-and-paper (39%), spreadsheets (52%), and software (63%).
With the influx of affordable, easy-to-deploy, and user-friendly digital solutions, there’s no reason why organisations shouldn’t choose a software solution to deploy their preventive maintenance plan. For example, A CMMS allows small and medium businesses and large enterprises to easily automate their maintenance management.
Step 3: Collect Equipment Data
To build an effective maintenance plan, you need to identify all of your assets. This includes equipment and machines that are critical to operations. When mapping out assets, group them into categories that help your maintenance team easily identify them. Such as:
- Location
- Priority
- Family (for example, air conditioning will be grouped into the HVAC maintenance family)
Maintenance management software allows you to attach important documentation, user manuals, manufacturer recommendations, warranties, and compliance standards to all digital asset files.
Step 4: Identify Critical Assets
With limited time and resources, scheduling a preventive maintenance plan for your inventory of equipment and machinery can be overwhelming. Instead, identify the assets that are critical for your operations.
Choosing just one or two priority assets offers a more manageable approach and acts as a testing ground for future planned maintenance. As well as making it easier to determine your KPIs.
Step 5: Determine KPIs
Setting KPIs is key to understanding if your maintenance plan is working. Example maintenance management KPIs include:
- Achieving 99% annual uptime of critical equipment
- Eliminating unplanned downtime within 3 years
- Increasing inventory and spare parts stock accuracy to 90%
- Reduce annual workplace-related accidents to under 2%
KPIs can be set either after critical assets have been identified or at the very beginning of the processes when you’re getting buy-in from stakeholders.
Step 6: Build a Process
Now it’s time to drill down and start implementing your preventive maintenance plan. Using a maintenance management tool, begin to schedule maintenance for both the short-term and long-term. This process includes:
- Assigning maintenance personnel
- Setting tasks
- Prioritising work orders with due dates and condition-based metrics
- Automating work orders
Step 7: Create a Preventive Maintenance Checklist
To promote regular preventive maintenance checks, list the tasks in your PM plan. This is called a preventive maintenance checklist.
This will include tasks, who they’re assigned to, completion dates, and other information. Checklists will be available to all personnel and accessible on a customer dashboard.
Tip: What to Include In a Preventive Maintenance Checklist
It’s important to remember that checklists depend on the business type, size, industry, location, and operation. However, there are common maintenance items that will feature in a preventive maintenance checklist:
- Has cleaning been actioned?
- Change lubricant
- Inspect tools for wear and tear
- Replace air filters
If you need help knowing what to include on your checklist, SafetyCulture has an example list here.
Step 8: Track, Review, and Adjust
A trap that many maintenance teams fall foul of is not reviewing their plan once it is deployed. By not monitoring schedules and leaving planned maintenance to stagnate, opportunities can be missed.
To track and monitor your plan effectively, be sure to:
- Regularly check manufacturers’ recommended procedures
- Use collected data and personal experience to tweak work orders
- Review the performance of technicians and maintenance teams
Examples & Use Case of Preventative Maintenance Systems
Maintenance managers will use a preventive maintenance management system like so:
- View upcoming activities on the system’s desktop or mobile app
- Assign team members to activities and log details
- Alerted when team members complete maintenance tasks
- Check that routine tasks are automatically scheduled for the next time
- Generate a preventive maintenance checklist and connect it with the system’s calendar
These steps are typical when deploying all types of PM strategies. For instance, preventative maintenance systems can have subsets, whereby software is set up for a dedicated area of expertise. Examples include:
- Equipment Preventive Maintenance Software: A system that focuses solely on equipment performance to ensure all equipment operates at peak efficiency.
- Building Preventive Maintenance Software: A solution that optimises building maintenance activities for occupancy safety.
- HVAC Preventive Maintenance Software: A system designed around the upkeep of HVAC units and providing HVAC engineers with the right capabilities to do so.
- Automotive/Fleet Preventive Maintenance Software: A system that tracks fleet usage by miles and trips completed to ensure vehicles run safely and adhere to compliance.
Types of Preventive Maintenance
Time-Based (TBM)
Time-based maintenance is an approach most commonly deployed for equipment that is essential to operations. It involves planned maintenance that can be triggered daily, weekly, monthly or annually to ensure equipment remains in optimal working condition.
Usage-Based (UBM)
Usage-based maintenance is saved for assets that are used daily. By setting usage-based triggers, maintenance managers and technicians will be alerted when equipment needs servicing.
Usage-based alerts can be triggered after a certain amount of operating hours, miles, or production cycles. For example, a vehicle may need to be serviced every 10,000 miles.
Failure-Finding (FFM)
Failure-finding maintenance is both unique to itself as well as a type of preventive maintenance. A failure-finding approach refers to an inspection that is carried out to discover defects or failures in an asset. For example, a malfunction in a smoke alarm will never be identified until that alarm is triggered.
Companies can choose to deploy any type of PM that suits their maintenance requirements. Some preventive maintenance examples include:
- Total preventive maintenance: Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is deployed to include all personnel – not just the maintenance team – in a proactive approach to maintenance. That includes machine operators, technicians, and asset managers.
- Planned preventive maintenance for buildings: PPM is used in facilities management to reduce the likelihood of HVAC units failing, elevators being unavailable, and roofs leaking, each risking the safety of building occupants.
- Lubricant and oil analysis: Scheduled oil and lubricant level changes in machinery are used to keep parts running smoothly and reduce machine wear.
How Preventive Maintenance Compares Against Other Maintenance Strategies
Vs. Reactive Maintenance
Whereas preventive maintenance takes a more proactive approach to carrying out regular maintenance, reactive maintenance is the opposite. Businesses that deploy reactive maintenance wait until an asset has failed, only then will engineers and technicians perform inspections and repairs.
Pros of Reactive Maintenance | Cons of Reactive Maintenance |
|---|---|
|
|
Vs. Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance is a proactive maintenance approach, like preventive maintenance, except maintenance teams use data analytics and machine learning to estimate and predict when an asset will fail and prevent it.
Pros of Predictive Maintenance | Cons of Predictive Maintenance |
|---|---|
|
|
Vs. Condition-Based Maintenance
Condition-based maintenance (CBM) actively monitors the health of moving and running equipment in real-time through the use of device monitoring sensors. This allows staff to determine when maintenance is required to optimise asset performance and determine the maintenance needed for each moving part.
Pros of Condition-Based Maintenance | Cons of Condition-Based Maintenance |
|---|---|
|
|
Preventive Maintenance Software FAQs
How Much Does Preventive Maintenance Software Cost?
The cost for preventive maintenance software in the UK ranges from £3 per asset/user per month to £50,000 one-time fee.
The cost of most maintenance software depends on the size and budget. For instance:
- Small companies will typically spend between £30 – £100 per user per month on a cloud-based system
- Medium to large businesses will spend between £50 – £200 per user per month
- Enterprise will spend between £200 per month – £50,000 one-time fee for an on-premise solution
There are also free preventive maintenance software packages available to new users, but these have limited capabilities and data space.
The cost of preventative maintenance software considers several factors. These include the number of users, deployment type, business type, features required, staff training, data migration, and more. Not to mention installation and hardware costs on top of that.
What Is the Best Preventive Maintenance Software?
This is subjective, what may be the best solution for one business may not be the best for another.
Ultimately, knowing what the best preventive maintenance software is for you will depend on the capabilities you require. Such as customisation, flexibility, ability to scale, and more.
Some software providers can attend to most of these requirements, including:
- SafetyCulture
- IBM Maximo
- Fleetio (automotive preventive maintenance software)
- ServiceChannel
- MaintainX
- Infraspeak
- UpKeep
- Fiix
What Preventative Maintenance Software Deployment Options Are Available?
When finding the right Preventive Maintenance Software, you’ll come across various terms when choosing a deployment type. These include web-based, mobile, desktop, app, and more.
Essentially, there are two main types of deployment; cloud-based and on-premise.
- Cloud-based Preventive Maintenance Software: A cloud preventive maintenance system is hosted on a vendor’s server and is accessed by customers via the internet and a dedicated log-in. This deployment is most common with SMBs looking to spread the implementation costs over monthly subscription payments. Vendors also refer to it as web-based, SaaS, or a subscription model.
- On-Premise Preventive Maintenance Software: An on-premise preventive maintenance solution refers to a system installed on-site and run by the user. This would require space to store hardware such as servers and a dedicated IT team to keep the system up and running. This is a deployment method most commonly used by enterprises, as it offers complete customisation and control over company data.
Are There Free Preventive Maintenance Systems?
Yes, there are free preventive maintenance solutions available on the market. However, they are typically limited in capabilities and users.
For instance, both Fiix and UpKeep offer free maintenance management solutions. But these both have limitations.
One non-software solution is using Excel spreadsheets, although these too come with limitations.
Is Preventive Maintenance Software for Small Businesses?
Yes, Preventive Maintenance Software is an ideal solution for smaller businesses that are looking to cut costs on unplanned downtime and asset turnover.
Thanks to SaaS subscription models, more small businesses can afford to implement a solution and deploy their automated maintenance plan. Several vendors provide solutions targeted for small businesses including Hippo CMMS, Limble, and Fiix.