Time Based Maintenance

When this long range maintenance planning has gained the importance to prevent the failures or reducing the chance of failures, the plant engineers developed and started concentrating on the Time based maintenance philosophy. In this policy the machine is overhauled at regular intervals and if any parts are worn out, they will be replaced; otherwise they will be cleaned and reassembled, technically known as Preventive Maintenance (PM). And a schedule is maintained and adhered to which is named as planned maintenance. To facilitate those managers who bother about their lost productive hours due to shutdowns for this type of preventive maintenance, the plant engineers have scheduled in such a way that the preventive maintenance is carried out on holidays or non-productive days or on the days when the production is not or less required. For some equipment that has the standbys could be planned in the regular days only without disturbing the regular production.

Thus the PM is sub-divided into two categories as planned maintenance for regular days and scheduled maintenance for off days. With the impressive results obtained by this philosophy every industry started adopting these policies so as to increase the life of their equipment and reduce the probability of failures under various heads like planned maintenance, predictive maintenance, scheduled maintenance, shutdown maintenance, fixed time maintenance, etc. with a little conceptual difference as suitable to their requirements. However, all these are derived from the preventive maintenance and time between two consecutive maintenance or duration of maintenance has become one of the parameters.

With the growing technology and facilities one had to concentrate on updating their equipment so as to match with the speed, flexibility and trend. The thought of Design out maintenance emerged in this connection.