Preventive Maintenance & And How It Can Benefit Your Organization

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario. You come to work in the morning one day and the day seems pretty slow. And, half day into the work, you find out that there is a huge emergency. The entire business comes to a halt and the maintenance team goes into firefighting mode, running to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

This situation, though not ideal, is something that pops up way too often in the organization during business hours. These random spikes are the reason behind inefficiency, stress, and not part of a sustainable maintenance strategy. The best way to move away from this kind of reactive maintenance is to adopt a preventive product maintenance process approach that focuses on fixing the product before it breaks, rather than jostling to fix it after.

What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance can be stated as the modification of a software product after delivery to detect and correct latent faults in the software product before they become operational faults. It should be observed that it does not address the operation of the software and its operational functions like, backup, recovery, system administration, which are normally performed by those who operate the software.

It is a preventive measure that works on the obsolescence of the software which is planned maintenance of the software system that is designed to improve its reliability and maintainability and reduce any unplanned maintenance activity. You perform preventive maintenance by anticipating and forecasting problems which might occur in the future.

Guidelines for preventive maintenance

Here are guidelines that will help prevent problems and help you leverage the process of preventive maintenance at every step of the product lifecycle.

1. Operational stage

• Debug the software on a regularly scheduled basis by referring to the defect log created after the Deployment.
• Maintainability i.e. one should periodically monitor system health and prevent system illness by checking the system maintainability level.

2. Architectural

• Good programming style will help curb down the impact of change and thereby reduce maintenance costs  
• Language characteristics:
  Language portability
  Language legibility
  Language stability
• Documentation of the source code and maintaining for configuration files

3. Managerial

• Motivating Preventive Maintenance Workers: A quality preventive maintenance program call for a highly motivated preventive maintenance crew.
• Establish inspection and preventive maintenance as a recognized, important part of the overall maintenance program should be inculcated.
• Assign competent, responsible people to the preventive maintenance program in order to maintain the overall progress.

4. Tentative

• To undertake preventive measures proper documentation at each level phase of development as well as maintenance phase is one of the strongest tools in the hands of the maintainer.
  
• Maintain a trend analysis that accounts for predictable changes. Like, CPU utilization rate always increases by 50% during late morning, it can be assumed that the increase is normal for that server.
  
• One should schedule preventive maintenance for the time when the software is available i.e. there is no load on the system and thus typically results in lesser downtime and cost.

Conclusion

We can clearly see that the current state of negligible attention to preventive maintenance can be attached to various reasons like, no clearly defined state of practice, also the economic factors like shortage of time and high cost incurred leads it to the activity of minimum importance. However, one should always remember one fact, ‘Prevention is better than cure.’