CMMS Insight Blog

What You Can Learn from Passive Preventive Maintenance

Feb 17, 2021 3:19:27 PM / by CMMS Insight Staff

As a maintenance manager, you know your way around the four maintenance strategies. You know your maintenance schedules and your predictive data and your asset management.

But what if we said that preventive maintenance isn’t just about the asset itself?

If that sounds completely counterintuitive, it’s time to learn a thing or two from IT maintenance strategies. Here’s how passive preventive maintenance can help you take a smarter approach to your overall maintenance strategy.

Preventive Maintenance for Your Facility

First, it helps to understand the basics. For that, we turn to preventive maintenance, a term you’re likely already familiar with.

One of the four types of maintenance strategies, preventive maintenance is a technique that involves periodically taking assets out of circulation to perform schedule maintenance. This is performed on a preplanned schedule regardless of whether or not the asset has any apparent problems.

The idea behind this strategy is simple: if you prevent an asset from breaking down by routinely taking care of it, you can stop small problems from festering into big ones.

Active vs. Passive Preventive Maintenance

With that in mind, we can turn to active and passive preventive maintenance strategy. These strategies are typically not used in asset management. Instead, they’re usually the purview of IT.

An active maintenance strategy includes active procedures to prolong your system’s lifespan. Typical active maintenance tasks include periodically cleaning the system and its components.

Passive maintenance, as the name implies, is less direct. However, that does not mean you do nothing. Passive preventive maintenance involves providing the best possible environment for the system to function optimally. This includes things like managing ambient temperature or limiting stress due to shocks or vibrations.

Transforming Reactive Maintenance to Successful Passive Maintenance

So, how does passive preventive maintenance relate to your facility and assets? Think of it as a smarter option to transition out of reactive maintenance and into a more holistic maintenance system.

In a pure reactive maintenance approach you wait until the machine breaks down before fixing a problem, leaving the machine unattended in the interim. Passive preventive maintenance works hand-in-hand with the preventive maintenance strategies you already use by letting you take a broader scope.

Rather than simply paying attention to the asset alone, passive preventive maintenance encourages you to consider how the surrounding environment impacts the asset. In doing so, you can extend the life of your asset by creating the optimal environment.

Even if you’re using a reactive maintenance system, passive preventive maintenance can benefit you. If you manage the environment, you can often reduce stressors that would worsen damage to your assets.

Let’s Do Better Maintenance Together

Passive preventive maintenance includes a valuable lesson for maintenance managers: when you’re protecting your asset, the asset alone isn’t enough. But if you want to take a truly holistic approach to maintenance management, you have to have the right tools for the job.

Our job is to help you find and understand those tools. Make sure to check out our blog for more great tips on preventive maintenance, like this post on the role of preventative maintenance software.

Topics: Computerized Maintenance Management System, CMMS Software, Preventative Maintenance Software, Facility Management, Preventative Maintenance, Asset Management

Written by CMMS Insight Staff