Preventive maintenance, also known as preventative maintenance, service is how you keep production moving at a brisk pace. Having an effective preventive service game plan means maintaining the assets producers need to do their jobs. Getting down to brass tacks, here are the ins and outs of preventative maintenance services couched in the same simple terms anyone can use to make a great burrito.

Preventative maintenance defined

Preventative maintenance means keeping heavy machinery and mission-critical assets up and running by providing upkeep and regular performance checks. Regular maintenance tasks are meant to repair things before they break the flow of your operation. Asset health monitoring and operation data analytics provide your management team the insight they need to keep things running smoothly and lead to reduced crises and emergency service repair requests.

So, making sure that your produce is up to snuff and that the guacamole and special sauce are ready to go before you open your restaurant is a no-brainer — and scheduling regular inventory updates to mitigate delays of orders to customers. That's what preventative maintenance means.

Understanding how and why preventative maintenance is performed means getting a maintenance plan on paper for your team to execute.

Developing a preventive maintenance plan

Every maintenance plan requires three key phases for your metaphorical burrito shop to flourish. These aren't overly complicated or detailed — but by considering them as you develop your plan, you will prevent headaches later on.

1. Inventory
Start by accounting for every asset. Every facility manager should understand which assets need to be repaired or replaced, track asset usage schedules, and use historical data to predict when an asset is likely to break down. Understanding how the asset or part is priced,  knowing other suppliers who provide the same part, and what alternatives you have in case you need them is an important part of the inventory process. Once these factors are accounted for, you can use these variables to create an optimal maintenance schedule.

Remember, you're accounting for all the ingredients that go into your burrito: the salsa, tortillas, meat, veggies and sauce.

2. Condition
When preparing an asset for repairs or replacement, you need benchmarks. Compare the current state of the equipment to its factory standard — those tomatoes were looking a little funky yesterday, are they still up to standard? How fresh is your beef before it's cooked? Establishing food standards is essentially what conditioning your assets means.

3. Maintain
Now that you've defined your standards, your system is now ready for planned maintenance work orders. Assign and schedule technicians to perform designated tasks. Using preventive maintenance can minimize and improve production standards, leading to higher customer satisfaction and a healthier bottom line.

The best burrito places maintain high-quality standards and take into account the opinions of their employees and customers. It's all about maintaining a higher standard and continuing to improve — which leads to some killer food.

Here's a stat to drive this home for you: preventive maintenance costs 10%-30% of what reactive maintenance does. Your checkbook will feel the difference if you take the time to get things in order.

CMMS software and preventive maintenance

Using CMMS software is one of the most effective ways to organize a preventive maintenance plan. MicroMain helps you reduce downtime, offset costly repairs and even extend the life of assets by centralizing your operations manufacturing process with asset accounting, scheduling work orders, inventory and labor tracking. This level of asset management is essential to not only keeping your operation moving but growing to scale, (and making the meanest burrito you can think of).

MicroMain also offers standardized reporting,  giving you detailed information and insights to find weaknesses and turn them into opportunities for optimization. Tracking, preserving, restoring and replacing these assets are essential before they fail, and a CMMS software like ours gets the job done.

Our world-class preventive maintenance software is available for you to use right away with our free trial option. Explore its robust and powerful features and observe how agile it is for yourself. To learn more, visit our FAQ page or contact us. For more reading, check out our blog and subscribe to our newsletter (more burrito metaphors may be included)!