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Industrial Engineering & Manufacturing vocabulary · Shop Floor and Maintenance

Preventive maintenance

Meaning in industrial engineering & manufacturing, with examples

nounCore term

In industrial engineering & manufacturing, preventive maintenance means: Planned maintenance done at regular intervals, such as cleaning, lubricating and replacing worn parts, to stop breakdowns before they happen. Often shortened to PM.

In Turkish: önleyici bakım, koruyucu bakım, periyodik bakım

How it is used

Maintenance teams schedule and carry out preventive maintenance based on time (every month) or usage (every 500 hours). It is contrasted with breakdown maintenance and with predictive maintenance, which uses sensor data. British English also says 'preventative'.

Example sentences

  1. Line 1 will be down on Saturday morning for preventive maintenance.

  2. Since we started a proper preventive maintenance plan, breakdowns on the compressors have almost stopped.

Common collocations

  • preventive maintenance plan
  • scheduled preventive maintenance
  • carry out preventive maintenance
  • PM schedule
  • TPMShort for total productive maintenance: an approach in which operators and maintenance staff share responsibility for keeping equipment in top condition, aiming for no breakdowns, defects or accidents.
  • downtimeTime when a machine or line is not producing even though it is scheduled to, because of a breakdown, a changeover, missing material or another problem.
  • OEEShort for overall equipment effectiveness: a percentage that shows how well a machine is used, calculated as availability × performance × quality.
  • utilizationThe percentage of available time that a machine, person or plant is actually busy working.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Shop Floor and Maintenance

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