Everything beyond what the operator can do: BM, PM, CBM, CM and MP, plus spare-parts and maintenance-data management.
Duration
5 Man-days
This pillar covers everything beyond what an operator can do, and the order of the work matters greatly. It does not start by rewriting the PM schedule. It starts with a failure history you can trust — because without knowing what fails, and how often, any schedule written is guesswork.
The work then separates into preventive maintenance, condition-based maintenance, corrective work so the same failure cannot recur, and maintenance prevention fed into the specification of new equipment — supported by spare parts, budget and scheduling. The measures are MTBF and MTTR, which respond to entirely different levers.
What this step covers
- Stopping equipment deterioration — PM and CBM
- Preventing failure — CM and MP
- Being ready when failure occurs — BM
- Supporting production as a cross-functional improvement team
What you receive
PM / CM / BM plans, an operator course in lubrication, adjustment and first-line repair, and a machine portfolio
Why the order matters more than the pace
Maintenance work divides into two groups that respond to completely different levers. The first is making repairs faster, which is a management problem — failure history, spare parts, tools, and how a job gets reported. The second is making failures rarer, which can only be solved by engineering.
Most plants start with the second — rewriting the whole PM schedule — before knowing what actually fails. The result is a thicker check sheet, busier technicians and numbers that do not move. Doing the first group properly takes a few months and shows plainly, and only then is there enough evidence to attack the second sensibly.
How to apply it on the floor
- Rank asset criticality before redesigning the PM plan
- Require a failure code and actual hours on every closed work order
- Retire PM tasks that have never found a defect, quarterly
- Separate the planner’s role from the dispatcher’s
The mistakes we see most
- Running the PM plan inherited from commissioning without ever revising it
- Measuring success by PM tasks completed rather than failures prevented
- Buying condition monitoring before PM compliance reaches 90%
Common questions
Should we start with PM or AM?
Usually AM first, because it frees technician hours for planned work. Starting with PM while technicians are buried in reactive work generally means the plan is not followed.