Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance services equipment on a fixed schedule — by time or usage — regardless of its actual condition, to reduce the chance of failure. It prevents some breakdowns but can replace healthy parts and still misses random faults.
Preventive maintenance (PM) is calendar- or runtime-based servicing: lubricate every month, replace every 2,000 hours, and so on. It is simple and avoids many failures, but because it ignores actual condition it tends to over-maintain healthy assets and under-protect against random faults. Many plants evolve from PM toward condition-based and predictive maintenance for critical assets.
Related terms
Predictive Maintenance (PdM) · CMMS · RCM (Reliability-Centred Maintenance)