Creating and maintaining a successful maintenance program takes a lot of work. A facility or a maintenance manager, who needs to spend part of their day on the shop floor dealing with operational issues will need any help they can get to keep up with the work and grant that all the machines are fully functional.

Investing in manufacturing software, which can help you to manage Maintenance triggers, is one of the easiest ways to help and ease the work of your team.

What is a maintenance trigger?

‘Maintenance triggers’ are alerts used to inform a team that maintenance is required on an asset. They must be created, tracked and executed for an effective maintenance process. A system that can help you to remind of these alerts is very useful.

There are five main maintenance triggers:

Breakdown Trigger
This Maintenance Trigger happens when a piece of equipment has a problem and there is necessary maintenance required for the equipment to go back to regular operations. It doesn’t require a specific maintenance strategy and sometimes a maintenance trigger is the only maintenance that a machine gets.

Usage Trigger
This Maintenance Trigger is based on usage information, like meter data, hours of use, or a number of production cycles. When you’re recommended by your supplier to plan maintenance to your machine every 10 production cycles, that’s considered a Usage Trigger.

Time-based Trigger
This happens when time is used to trigger maintenance activities, which happen based on the measurement of time, such as a calendar. It is easy to predict and to schedule a trigger, when you schedule a maintenance operation to happen every 4 weeks or based on seasons.

Event-based Trigger
This trigger happens when maintenance is necessary due to an event.
Imagine your factory – you might need to have a set of maintenance tasks to implement in case of a power outage.

Condition-based Trigger
When the condition of one equipment is assessed and it is determined that it needs maintenance that was not planned, that is considered a condition-based trigger. From visual inspections to thermographic analysis, the condition analysis can be done through a variety of methods and requires a posterior analysis of the collected information.

These five Maintenance Triggers suit different types of maintenance, from predictive to reactive. Having software that helps you to register, plan and schedule maintenance activities can help you keep up with your maintenance tasks and leave nothing behind. Sign up now and find out how Prodsmart can help you.