SUMMARY
Use Preventive Maintenance to schedule and manage recurring maintenance activities based on time or machine usage. Preventive Maintenance helps reduce unplanned downtime by ensuring maintenance tasks are completed before equipment failures occur.
WHAT THIS IS
Preventive Maintenance is a feature that allows maintenance work to be planned and tracked within Factbird.
Unlike traditional maintenance schedules that rely only on calendar dates, Factbird can also schedule maintenance based on production cycles, allowing maintenance to be performed according to actual equipment usage.
Maintenance activities are organised using Maintenance Plans, which automatically generate Work Orders when maintenance becomes due. Completed work is stored in Maintenance Logs, providing a history of maintenance activities.
WHY IT MATTERS
Performing maintenance before equipment failures occur helps improve production reliability and reduce unexpected downtime.
Preventive Maintenance helps you:
- Schedule recurring maintenance tasks.
- Base maintenance on actual machine usage or calendar intervals.
- Track outstanding and completed maintenance work.
- Improve equipment reliability.
- Support operator-driven maintenance and continuous improvement.
WHEN YOU WOULD USE THIS
Use this when:
- Planning recurring maintenance activities.
- Scheduling maintenance based on production cycles.
- Scheduling maintenance based on calendar intervals.
- Reviewing outstanding maintenance work.
- Recording completed maintenance activities.
HOW IT WORKS
Preventive Maintenance is built around three main components:
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Maintenance Plans define when maintenance should occur and automatically generate work orders.
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Work Orders contain the maintenance activities that need to be completed. They are displayed as Due, Overdue, or Upcoming, helping maintenance teams prioritise their work.
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Maintenance Logs store completed maintenance records and can also be used to record unplanned maintenance activities.
Maintenance plans can be triggered using:
- Calendar intervals (for example, every week or every month).
- Elapsed time since the previous maintenance activity.
- Production cycles, where maintenance is scheduled after a defined number of products have been produced.
Because cycle-based maintenance uses live production data, maintenance can be scheduled according to actual equipment usage rather than estimated operating time.
KEY TERMS / COMPONENTS
Maintenance Plan
- Defines when recurring maintenance should occur and automatically generates work orders.
Work Order
- A maintenance task that has been created from a Maintenance Plan and is ready to be completed.
Maintenance Log
- A record of completed or manually recorded maintenance activities.
Cycle-Based Maintenance
- Maintenance that is triggered after a specified number of production cycles or products rather than after a fixed period of time.
Grace Period
- An additional period after a maintenance trigger before the work order is marked as overdue.
COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS
- Preventive Maintenance does not perform maintenance automatically. It schedules, tracks, and records maintenance activities.
- Cycle-based maintenance is driven by production data rather than calendar dates.
- Maintenance Plans create Work Orders automatically when their trigger conditions are met.
- Maintenance activities can be recorded even if they were not generated from a Maintenance Plan.
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