Preventive maintenance compliance (PMC) is a term you may have heard before, but what does it mean? In short, PMC is the practice of adhering to a preventive maintenance program to ensure equipment reliability and safety. In this post, we’ll explore what PMC is, why it’s important, and how to calculate it.
What is Preventive Maintenance Compliance?
Preventive maintenance compliance is the term for the practice of ensuring that your facility completes all preventive maintenance (PM) tasks according to schedule and following company policy. It is a critical element of good operations management and helps organizations avoid expensive and damaging breakdowns. PMC is a calculation that you can use to measure the percentage of preventive maintenance that your team completes on time. It is a useful metric for how effective and efficient your preventive maintenance program is.
Why You Should Measure Preventive Maintenance Compliance
You can reduce equipment downtime by using preventive maintenance. But the effectiveness of PMs depends on their optimization, regularity, and timeliness. Maintenance teams can identify weak points in their PM program by conducting a preventive maintenance compliance study. In addition to maximizing uptime, organizations may use resources like parts, personnel, and cash more effectively.
With PMC, you can determine if preventive maintenance tasks are still necessary. With most maintenance departments setting a goal of 80% preventive maintenance, that’s a considerable investment of time and money in these tasks. Tracking your preventive maintenance compliance not only helps you understand the success of this investment. If you discover some tasks aren’t completed and have no impact, you can free up some resources for work that will have a greater impact.
Also, after measuring PMC, you can investigate why certain PMs aren’t being performed consistently. This is a difficult task to do if you can’t even pinpoint which crucial activities are being neglected. The causes can range from a problem in the work order procedure to a lack of spare parts or a manpower shortage. Knowing where your procedures and resources are deficient will help you identify a solution so that crucial assets receive the care they require.
Finally, preventive maintenance compliance is a crucial resource for getting ready for audits. Auditors frequently examine the PM program and level of compliance at a plant. Critical PM noncompliance can result in harsh consequences, including fines. Maintaining a record of PM compliance can help you avoid penalties during audits and show auditors that your company is making a solid effort.
How to Measure PMC
To calculate preventive maintenance compliance, you need to determine your time period and gather your preventive maintenance work orders. Then, you can calculate your PMC percentage by dividing the quantity of completed preventive maintenance work orders by the quantity of scheduled preventive maintenance work orders during the period and multiplying by 100. No matter if they are scheduled or not, PMC only takes into consideration preventive maintenance actions. Even if you schedule reactive maintenance, it does not count as part of this calculation.
Preventive Maintenance Compliance = # of completed PMs ÷ # of scheduled PMs x 100
For instance, you have 120 PMs for the previous month. Of those PMs, your team finished 90, leaving 30 incomplete. You would divide 90 by 120 and multiply the result by 100 to find your PMC for the month. In this example, your preventive maintenance compliance would be 75%.
What PMs Should You Include in the PMC Calculation?
The amount of late PMs or how far behind schedule they are are not factors in the PMC formula. Working with the 10% rule is, therefore, a smart idea because it takes into account tardy PMs and prevents you from ignoring consistently late jobs that are finished just before the deadline. According to the 10% rule, you only count completed PMs as compliant if you finish them within a 10% window of their scheduled maintenance period. For instance, a job with a 60-day PM cycle would only be compliant if it was finished within six days of the due date. The task cannot be counted as a completed PM in your PMC calculation if it is outside that 10% window.
Some minor issues will probably slip through the cracks, therefore the 10% rule isn’t a rigid maintenance requirement. But it’s one of the greatest ways to create a baseline to weed out potentially tardy PMs. This makes your preventive maintenance compliance a more realistic reflection of your team’s success.
Use PMC to Optimize Your Preventive Maintenance
Now you know what work orders to include and how to calculate PMC, but what should your goal be? In world-class operations, an ideal preventive maintenance compliance is 90%. While there are many forms of continuous improvement, tracking metrics like PMC can help you allocate resources more efficiently, enhance health and safety, and reduce unneeded downtime. PMs are present for a purpose: to prevent failure. However, a weak preventive maintenance plan may encourage additional failures. Monitoring preventive maintenance compliance reveals where your strategy has shortcomings. Enhancing PM compliance can make a significant difference in increasing asset reliability and saving time and money.
