A preventive maintenance program could save 12-18% over reactive maintenance, as the U.S. Department of Energy predicted in 2010. For many businesses, the savings could be higher, considering the risks of downtime and today’s economic conditions pushing up costs across the supply chain.
It’s also possible for a program to miss the mark. By one measure, 50% of the costs of a preventive maintenance program are often wasted. The question is, how do you know if your maintenance program is generating savings or just adding expenses?
preventive maintenance program
Statistics can only describe maintenance outcomes in the abstract, usually with averages including businesses outside your industry. Your facility, and the outcomes you need to prioritize, aren’t averages.
If you’re going to understand how or if your preventive maintenance program is saving or wasting money, you’re going to have to measure your costs and your desired outcomes. If you do, you may be amazed by the value of your preventive maintenance program.
deficient maintenance
When a maintenance program doesn’t reduce repair costs, it’s the maintenance provider who benefits from that
Or you may find yourself asking why you aren’t seeing the benefits you should. The answer may be that your program is designed to benefit someone else.
When a maintenance program doesn’t reduce repair costs or increase equipment life as long as it should, it’s the maintenance provider who benefits from that deficient maintenance, because that deficiency gets them paid faster for the inevitable repair and replacement.
Does your service provider want your system to fail?
As the provider of both your preventive maintenance and your reactive maintenance, a service provider has an inherent conflict of interest. The optimal outcome for them, on paper, looks like preventive maintenance that has the least possible positive outcome for the client, since that also maximizes their repair and replacement.
Of course, there are other factors at play, including the question of whether it's ethical to provide “just enough” preventive maintenance, or perhaps worse, to “overdo” planned preventive maintenance when it won’t benefit the client more than a more cost-effective approach, such as condition-based preventive maintenance.
How would I know a program is compromised?
To help decide whether a full assessment of your maintenance is warranted, check the list of “green flags”
You may be reluctant to devote time and energy to fully investigating the cost-effectiveness of your maintenance program without some indication that you should be worried. Of course, if it’s too time-consuming or frustrating to figure out how effective your maintenance is, that’s already a red flag, your program either lacks transparency or just isn’t prioritizing measurable outcomes.
To help you decide whether a full assessment of your maintenance is warranted, check the list of “green flags” below. The fewer green flags you find, the more you should consider a full assessment.
1) 50% less is spent on repairs than our maintenance program.
A good rule of thumb to start with: if your business spends over half the cost of your maintenance program on additional repairs, then the maintenance program isn’t prioritizing saving you those repair costs.
2) We’ve experienced no unscheduled downtime within 3 years.
One of the main benefits of preventive maintenance is improved control over downtime. By planning maintenance tasks to fit your productivity needs and avoiding equipment failure, you avoid unscheduled downtime.
If your maintenance isn’t providing that benefit, then either maintenance schedules or equipment conditions need more attention.
3) Air filters are rated MERV 8 or above and changed at least quarterly.
The CDC recommends using the highest efficiency filters possible, considering the impact on the HVAC system
Without proper filtration, particulates contaminate your indoor air and cost your system useful life by accumulating inside the system and accelerating wear-and-tear, for instance, particulates that bypass filtration can contribute to coil fouling.
To be clear, MERV 8 is not a recommendation for air quality purposes. For instance, the CDC recommends using the highest efficiency filters possible, considering the impact on the HVAC system, while ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) recommends a minimum of MERV 13.
4) Maintenance tasking is based on equipment conditions and customized by attributes.
This is one place waste easily occurs. Maintenance that ignores conditions, and is only time-based, can over-maintain and waste the useful life of parts. Condition-based maintenance doesn’t rely solely on models that estimate aging but also monitor data and tests for variables that indicate needed maintenance.
One study found that only 15-20% of equipment failures were age-related, while the rest were caused by random effects. Since 99% of equipment failures are preceded by some kind of condition or indication of failure, tasking preventive maintenance based on data, rather than schedules, can prevent premature failures that time-based maintenance would miss and increase cost-effectiveness by taking advantage of longer useful life.
5) All technicians in our buildings train on safety and electrical workplace hazards, including the NFPA 70E standard.
Maintenance functions can be dangerously siloed when it comes to safety, and sometimes, HVAC technicians are only trained on HVAC tasks. It’s easy to believe that only electrical workers need electrical safety training, but nothing could be further from the case.
HVAC technicians also require safety training to deal with hazards they may encounter in the work environment
The National Fire Protection Association’s latest report on fatal electrical injuries in the workplace highlights deadly incidents involving work on ventilation systems, and the report on non-fatal injuries states that installation, maintenance, and repair workers suffered the largest share of injuries from exposure to electricity, with service occupations next.
HVAC technicians also require safety training to deal with hazards they may encounter in the work environment, such as fall protection, heat stress awareness and approved procedures for confined spaces. A program that doesn’t prioritize safety training can’t pretend to be cost-effective if it opens the door to injury and liability.
Avoid conflicts of interest
If your maintenance program is compromised, more transparency, with clear, measurable results, can help. Service providers can also prove they prioritize your results by removing that conflict of interest. How? By offering preventive maintenance with quality assurances, such as guarantees to replace maintainable parts at their own cost.
That not only removes the conflict of interest but also aligns their interests with yours. By taking your risk of repair costs on themselves, service providers prove they have no conflict of interest, and you can trust they are prioritizing better outcomes for your cost-efficiency.