Learning how to design an effective preventive maintenance checklist that can help you proactively detect issues and significantly reduce asset downtime.
Business operations are complicated, and a few seconds of downtime caused by hardware malfunction reduce productive capacity as well as causes economic losses. For this reason, a well-designed preventive maintenance checklist helps reduce the infrastructure’s downtime and improve the lifespan. However, drafting a practical preventive maintenance checklist requires careful analysis of your assets and a thorough understanding of your maintenance goals.
Designing the perfect maintenance checklist
Identify maintenance goals
To begin with, you must identify your goals for which you can skim through the maintenance data. Some of the goals should include minimizing the maintenance costs, improving compliance, reducing production rejects, reducing the chances of errors, improving uptime, and enhancing safety standards. Your business might have other priorities which are identifiable through the maintenance data.
Audit assets
Once you’ve outlined your maintenance goals, the next step is documenting the equipment and the current operational state. When a piece of equipment breaks down, it is common for maintenance teams to lose track of installed spare parts on the equipment. For this reason, it is essential to audit the equipment to streamline the repair process. The audit information should include available stock, models, and serial numbers. In addition, it should consist of the response time of repairs, maintenance costs, and expected downtime.
Focus on regulations & standardization
The majority of facilities need to comply with stringent safety and health requirements. In some cases, it means keeping the specific equipment pieces in good form. Both state and federal regulations have certain laws and rules that demand specific maintenance processes and tasks. So, while creating the preventive maintenance checklist, consider the rules and standardization.
Choose assets
Some maintenance checklists cover several assets, while some are applicable for specific equipment. In either case, you need to choose the high-priority systems and assets where the checklist has the most significant impact. Some of these include the core systems and machines for your process, high-value and high-risk assets, and assets regulated by the state or federal government. It’s always better to focus on limited assets to take your checklist for a test drive.
Identify preventive maintenance tasks
Now that you have the list of your systems and assets identifying the preventive maintenance tasks is your next step. Everyday PM tasks include lubrication, metering, tuning, adjustments, parts replacement, condition monitoring, and inspection. Moreover, you must note the priority, critical equipment, and frequency for every asset. For this purpose, you can utilize current checklists as a reference to assist with the process. Determining the task priority also helps conduct FMEA (failure mode & effects analysis). As a result, it will be easier to predict the malfunctioning, its impact on the process, and prevent it in the future.
Creating checklist items
Once you’ve outlined the tasks for every asset, it’s time to accumulate the information and create a list. Every item on the PM checklist should have instructions to help technicians understand the inspection process and be aligned logically. Moreover, you must leave blanks for responses (keeping it open-ended is better). It is often an excellent strategy to create one checklist per asset category to make managing checklists easier and quicker.
Training
Ensuring that the maintenance team is correctly implementing them is essential. Usually, maintenance teams are hesitant towards adopting such checklists, but proper discussions can ease the transition. You can discuss the importance of the checklists and share how it could ease their job as well. This adaption will likely take time, but regular training and discussion sessions will streamline the overall process.
Tracking outcomes & improvising
Like other business and maintenance processes, it’s essential to track the implementation of the PM checklist. With time, you will find ways to add or deduct certain items from the checklist, make time-related changes, and retrain the technicians in case of new changes or if someone doesn’t perform effectively. In simpler words, you must remain flexible even after creating and implementing the checklist as it helps with constant improvement.
Conclusion
Creating the perfect preventive checklist requires a thorough analysis of your assets and maintenance goals. The ideal preventive checklist can help your maintenance team proactively detect and fix issues before they become show-stoppers and can significantly improve your asset performance. At BriskForce, we offer an all-in-one CMMS platform that can help you digitalize preventive maintenance and asset management. Click here for a 14-day free trial and see how it can positively impact your operations.