What is Preventive Maintenance:

Preventive maintenance is the maintenance that is regularly performed on a piece of equipment or Instruments to reduce the possibility of its failure or breakdown during running. It is performed while the equipment is still working so that it does not break down unexpectedly.

Procedure for Performing preventive maintenance :

List out all equipments and prepare the preventive maintenance schedule in daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and yearly, wherever applicable.

The checks to be performed during preventive maintenance and their frequencies shall be as per the equipment/vendors recommendation and based on the experience of engineering team.

The preventive maintenance schedule will be carried out with in ± two days for weekly preventive maintenance and with in ± seven days for Monthly, Quarterly, ± thirty days Half-yearly and Yearly preventive maintenance if any production emergency activities are planned.

The Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Half-yearly and Yearly preventive maintenance of all Process equipments and Utility equipments is the responsibility of the technical assistants or machine operators and verification of the same is the responsibility of respective department incharge.

The maintenance personal after carrying out the preventive maintenance shall record the details in equipment usage log book of the respective equipment’s or instruments. The same shall be checked by concerned production in charge.

After preventive maintenance the respective area and equipment’s shall be cleaned in case of Manufacturing area equipments parts as it is coming in product contact.

Ensure the availability of equipment’s for preventive maintenance as per the schedule and Plan advance planning is required for any external support to carry out the preventive maintenance.

Check the availability of spares or consumables, which are planning to change during the preventive maintenance of any machinery.

The person who carries the preventive maintenance shall fill the preventive maintenance checklist of particular equipment and shall update the activity executed date in planner also.

Different formats required to be filled for different equipment’s or instruments or utilities and required formats shall be issued from Quality assurance as per requirements.

After completion of preventive maintenance status label of the equipment’s or instruments or utilities hall be updated accordingly.

For those equipments which are not in use for more than three months, the preventive maintenance shall not be done and further scheduled preventive maintenance shall be discontinued.

Concerned department personnel shall raise the work request memo for carrying out the preventive maintenance of those “Not in use’ equipment before taking into production. Further preventive maintenance schedules shall be maintained from that instance.

A separate preventive maintenance schedule shall be prepared for the newly installed equipment from the date of respective preventive maintenance SOP implementation or after performance qualification of the equipment’s.

For obsolete equipment’s the preventive maintenance shall be discontinued from the date of obsolete and the schedule for particular equipment shall be appended with a comment “obsolete” and duly signed by concerned maintenance executive.

preventive maintenance planner shall be updated annually & same scheduled shall be followed for the same year & when ever any new equipment is qualified the preventive maintenance shall be updated through add on and checklist shall be prepared.

Importance of preventive maintenance and Conclusion :

preventive maintenance is required as per regulatory and Good Manufacturing practice requirement (GMP).

It will save cost of organization or decreased the downtime i.e An unexpected failure in equipment can ideal the equipment, ideal of employee, can stop or delay production etc. so a periodic preventive maintenance plan can save a company or organization money .

Improved Safety measures i.e Preventive maintenance improves the safety of equipment’s and therefore the safety of company workers resulting in fewer on the job injuries and accidents.

Improved Reliability i.e Customers can count on a company to deliver products, materials, or service on time, without unnecessary delays.

Conservation of Assets i.e Most equipment’s are not cheap now a days, so a company should cares for its equipment, the longer it will last. Preventive maintenance will increase the life of equipment resulting in reduced costs and increased profit.

But in most of the company or organization preventive maintenance are not performed as per scheduled and preventive maintenance checklist are being filled and dates are being changed in the equipment’s.

All the checkpoints mentioned in the preventive maintenance checklist are not followed which can lead to the breakdown of the equipment during running.

In most cases as per my experience i have observed that equipment’s are being used for 24 hours or 365 days and the user departments are not handed over the equipment to engineering department for planned preventive maintenance.

Management of the company or organization should take it seriously and should run the machine by considering preventive maintenance schedule.

           

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