6 common mistakes in your predictive maintenance plan
Carrying out a predictive maintenance plan is a smart way to avoid future costs, you know that. And in order to do this, you will need predictive maintenance software and a plan. But what are the most common mistakes made in a maintenance programme of this type? Here is a list of the 6 most common errors made by building managers and/or facility managers.
What is a predictive maintenance plan ?
The current trend in facilities management is to move towards sustainability. To this end, we work with building automated systems (BAS) and implement strategies and dedicated software for both preventive and predictive maintenance.
The latter, you will use as maintenance technicians to facilitate the path and management of the maintenance plan that you have established. For example, when technicians talk about “the maintenance range” they refer to the “physical” planning of daily maintenance work (what, how, when and where maintenance tasks will be carried out).
In a maintenance range, you will have defined the components of maintainability, conservation, and reliability, as well as the definition of the management roles of each of the different organisational strata and employees, to ensure compliance. All this will be part of your maintenance plan.
This pre-planning will help develop the programme with calendar-based frequencies or the use of equipment to perform activities that are considered important for maintenance.
Here is an example of scheduled tasks :
- Monday : Check consumption of capacitor banks.
- Tuesday : Cleaning of filters in Fan-Coil.
- Wednesday : …
Having a preventative maintenance plan in place can extend the lifespan of your expensive equipment, helping to prevent future failures. And within preventive maintenance, there is a more advanced variant, known as predictive maintenance. The latter consists of analyzing and monitoring the state of your facilities in order to detect future deficiencies and make maintenance recommendations.
Whatever type of planning you are going to carry out, you will work with a maintenance management program, as I said at the beginning. These software tools are known as CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System).
If you are the facility manager or responsible for a facility, and you are thinking of implementing a predictive maintenance plan, it would be good for you to know the main mistakes that can be made in a predictive maintenance programme, and learn how to avoid them.
Error #1: obsolete technologies
Innovative technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things), also known as Industry 4.0., are still not used enough because of the lack of knowledge in this sector.
This type of technology can provide information based on data, which will provide great benefits to your maintenance plan with the help, for example, of maintenance management software (CMMS).
Another type of software that will be of great help to you and that facility managers frequently forget is the EMS (Energy Management Software) such as the DEXMA Platform.
Generally, maintenance professionals who apply the predictive maintenance methodology do not realize that combining both management software will help them achieve objectives more easily. In addition, they will improve the energy savings of your buildings through proper energy management. In this article, you can learn more about the integration between a CMMS and a BMS. Although focused on retail, the example can be applied to other sectors.
Be aware that proper energy management will help you detect deficiencies in your facilities.
For instance, suppose you are reviewing the energy consumption data of your facilities in your EMS, where consumption is monitored and analysed in an advanced way. Here you can create alarms that detect, for example, peaks in consumption, which will inform you that there is still abnormal behavior in some of your machines, climate systems, electrical installations, etc.
Congratulations! You have most likely detected a deficiency in time and will be able to fix it before the installation eventually fails. But these technologies are pointless if you don’t fully implement them and use them regularly.
Error #2 : getting ahead of predictive maintenance
Traditional facility management aims to anticipate objectives, but if a predictive maintenance programme is carried out, it must follow its intended course in order to be effective.
Anticipating scheduled reviews of your predictive maintenance programme and performing planned maintenance ahead of time will result in programme deviations and potential problems.
Error #3 : improper roles of CMMS and EMS users
As a facility manager, you will use a CMMS to control and manage the maintenance of the facilities.
It is very important that you correctly define the roles of each user in your predictive maintenance programme, and that you give access to each user in your CMMS. If you don’t do it, there will be problems in the compliance of the programming. In addition, you will prevent unauthorized personnel from performing maintenance tasks outside their area of competence.
These roles should also be defined in energy management tasks.
For example, in an advanced energy management solution such as the DEXMA Platform, you can create an unlimited number of users. The platform also allows you to quickly invite users belonging to other accounts external to yours, in this article on user management in the DEXMA Platform we explain how to do it.
>>> Discover all the mistakes you need to avoid in this article <<<
