Scheduling Procedure for Preventive Maintenance

As we know that the preventive maintenance (PM) is adopted in numerous ways in the industries of which the most common in use are planned maintenance, scheduled maintenance, maintenance prevention etc., the scheduling depends on the PM policy adopted by the organisation.

The importance goes to the uninterrupted production in scheduled maintenance while the priority rule is based on the frequency of failures or rate of failure, mean time between failures (MTBF) in planned maintenance and the age/utilised life of the equipment in maintenance prevention etc. The general guidelines for scheduling procedure of preventive maintenance are as under.

• A suitable preventive maintenance policy is laid down depending on the requirements and the availability of the organisation.
• Understand the priority rule that predominates in the PM policy adopted.
• List out all the machines and identify the machines those require regular/preventive maintenance.
• Determine frequency of preventive maintenance on each machine.
• Design the duration of PM in terms of Inspection (I), Small repair (S), Major overhaul (M) and Complete overhaul(C) or Weekly (W), Monthly (M), Quarterly (Q), Half yearly (H) and Yearly (Y), etc.
• Allocate these I, S, M, C or W, M, Q, H, Y or any other suitable set to various days in the maintenance horizon (the period for which the maintenance policy is observed) such that jobs are distributed evenly and uniformly.
• Correlate with the production schedules and remove the overlaps, if any.
• Reschedule by using step 6.