Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO

You’ve landed on this page because you want to know what Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is and if it can benefit your facility.  The answer to your second question is an absolute YES.  The first question takes a little more time.

You’ve most likely been asked to research the Preventive Maintenance Optimization process to gain a better understanding of its use and benefit.  Here are a series of positions that you should answer honestly ‘yes’ to if Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is going to be right for you:

  1. Our current PM program and practice does not follow a standard methodology or universal standard.
  2. Our PM task were created haphazardly, most likely by maintenance supervisors or planners, using the OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturer) recommendations as a guideline.
  3. The very components we are PM’ing are the very components that are failing.
  4. Our storeroom does not always have the part we need when we need it.
  5. We can’t seem to get all our PMs done, usually because production won’t give us the equipment or our technicians keep getting pulled off for ‘emergencies.’
  6. Our PM activities are not a core value driver of our business, and are not seen as value-added by production.

If you answered ‘yes’ to these six situational points, or a majority of them, then Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is likely the right direction for you.

Boiling it down to the ‘big three’ universally accepted methodologies for developing a maintenance strategy for your equipment, each has a core targeted purpose:

  • Failure Modes and Effects Analysis – FMEA, is generally a practice used for a ‘green field’ or a new facility. For example, building a new building on a vacant lot, and installing all new equipment.  This is a ‘green field’ in that you start, literally, with a green field.  In FMEA, you would consider everything that could possibly go wrong with everything.  That gets boiled down to priorities using the Risk Priority Number (RPN) and further clarified, if desired, through FMECA – adding in ‘criticality’.
  • Reliability Centered Maintenance Principles – RCM, is generally a practice used for a ‘white paper’ or a new piece of equipment project. For example, you are going to design, build, and install a new asset (press, conveyor, 747 airplane).  You are literally starting with a blank sheet of ‘white paper’ – thus the ‘white paper reference.  In RCM, you would consider everything that could possibly go wrong with this new machine.
  • Preventive Maintenance Optimization Process – often referred to simply as PMO, is generally a practice used for an existing plant or facility, with existing equipment, that has a history of failures and an established PM program (for better or worse). The major focus for Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is to eliminate all the failures we’ve had in the past, and then concentrate on what else could possibly go wrong (see FMEA, FMECA, RCM). 

In a way, doesn’t it make sense that we first concentrate on what is already kicking out butts?

Maintenance Innovators, Inc. has seen typical results showing an average of 20% less in off-line PM time requirements; netting more operational time.  Additionally, PMs tasks are focused on failure modes and not failures; resulting in the identification of failures in the process of failing with time to plan and schedule corrective maintenance.

Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO is typically handled as a workshop.  After some training to align our thinking, we are going to get to work on:

  • Enhancing your PMs and your PM return on investment.
  • We are going to align you PM tasks with failure modes.
  • We are going to attack what is truly is ‘eating your lunch’

Your PM tasks and work orders will be enhanced to:

  • Identify one failure mode and one preventive/predictive strategy to counter with.
  • Align failure modes with PM strategies.
  • Find the most effective and efficient PM strategy to minimize interruption to production and net what W. Edwards Deming referred to as “Constancy of Purpose.”
  • Standardize the approach to executing PMs on common components.
  • Identify tasks better accomplished by operators, this is autonomous maintenance.

During a successful Preventive Maintenance Optimization process workshop, it is virtually impossible not to include a frank and open conversation about storeroom support for the assets.  That discussion should be welcomed and expected.

Maintenance Innovators, Inc. has over thirty-six years of experience building and executing highly effective and efficient preventive maintenance programs.  Preventive maintenance is the singularly most important responsibility of maintenance.

Call or email now and let us work with you as a valued partner to build a Preventive Maintenance Optimization PMO practice that delivers the much needed guarding of your asset’s inherent reliability.  The results of your PMs should be the number one input into your planning and scheduling.  Let’s get that done!  Your first step is a call away.