May 16, 2025
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Preventive Maintenance

Solid standard or outdated strategy in production processes?

In production, machine availability is crucial for success and avoiding downtime. Unexpected machine failure can paralyze entire production lines and result in significant costs.
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That is why many companies rely on preventive maintenance, which involves regularly performing maintenance work to prevent failures.However, as secure as this strategy seems, it is only the beginning.
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There are smarter, more effective approaches that are revolutionizing maintenance and achieving real efficiency, yet many companies have not begun to exploit this potential.What do these modern solutions look like? How can maintenance be made truly future-proof?

What is Preventive Maintenance?

This is how Preventive Maintenance works

The various maintenance strategies

Benefits of preventive maintenance

Disadvantages of preventive maintenance

Examples of the different maintenance strategies

This is how preventive maintenance differs from other strategies

The right maintenance strategy for your company

Definition: What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive Maintenance is a central part of maintenance management, especially in the manufacturing industry.
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The goal is to prevent machine failures before they occur. To this end, regular, scheduled maintenance measures are carried out, such as inspections,repairs, and replacement of worn parts.

These interventions are performed regardless of the machine's actual condition, often at fixed intervals, such as every 500 operating hours or once a month.

The principle is as follows: Predictive measures should slow wear, extend service life, and prevent unplanned downtime.

However, this method has its limits. It often intervenes when there is no immediate need for maintenance, which can waste time, resources, and parts.

Modern solutions, such as software from aiomatic, go one step beyond. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time machine data, the current status is constantly analyzed, and maintenance measures are only initiated when necessary.

This is how Preventive Maintenance works

Preventive maintenance is divided into two main phases: planning and implementation.

1st: Planning maintenance measures
The first step is creating a maintenance plan as part of your maintenance strategy.
This includes inspections, lubrication intervals, and replacement of spare parts.
These intervals depend on the definition and importance of Preventive Maintenance for your systems, and can be defined by time or operating hours.

2nd: Implementation by specialized personnel
‍Trained maintenance team carries out the planned maintenance measures through.
Typical activities include visual inspection, functional testing, lubrication, cleaning and the targeted exchange of Wearing parts.
The aim of preventive maintenance is to prevent machine failures.

Various maintenance strategies

Choosing the right maintenance strategy is crucial for the smooth operation of your production plants and machines. Depending on requirements, machine type and budget, there are three main approaches:

Preventative Maintenance

Regular maintenance measures based on fixed time intervals or operating hours.

Predictive Maintenance

Maintenance is carried out based on real-time monitoring and data analysis. This allows you to identify abnormalities early on, before they lead to faults.

Reactive maintenance

Maintenance only after a failure, when a defect has already occurred. Cheap in the short term, but risky and expensive in the long term due to unplanned shutdowns.

While Preventive Maintenance is still frequently used, modern solutions such as Predictive Maintenance offer many advantages as they are tailored to the actual condition of the machines. aiomatic helps with the transition from Preventive Maintenance to Predictive Maintenance: to make it simple, scalable and quick to implement — even for companies without their own IT department or data science team.

Die verschiedenen Instandhaltungsstrategien

Die Wahl der richtigen Instandhaltungsstrategie ist entscheidend für den reibungslosen Betrieb Ihrer Produktionsanlagen und Maschinen. Je nach Anforderungen, Maschinentyp und Budget kommen drei Hauptansätze in Frage:

Vorbeugende Instandhaltung

Regelmäßige Wartungsmaßnahmen basierend auf festen Zeitintervallen oder Betriebsstunden.

Vorausschauende Instandhaltung

Auch als Predictive Maintenance bekannt. Hier erfolgt die Wartung auf Basis von Echtzeitüberwachung und Datenanalyse. Anomalien werden frühzeitig erkannt, bevor diese zu Störungen führen.

Reaktive Instandhaltung

Wartung erst nach einem Ausfall, wenn ein Defekt bereits eingetreten ist. Kurzfristig günstig, aber langfristig riskant und teuer wegen ungeplanter Stillstände.

Während vorbeugende Wartung noch häufig eingesetzt wird, bieten moderne Lösungen wie die vorausschauende Instandhaltung viele Vorteile, da sie auf den tatsächlichen Zustand der Maschinen abgestimmt ist. aiomatic hilft beim Übergang von vorbeugender Wartung zu vorausschauender Wartung: einfach, skalierbar und schnell umsetzbar zu machen – auch für Unternehmen ohne eigene IT-Abteilung oder Data-Science-Team.

Benefits of Preventive Maintenance

Although Preventive Maintenance is still considered standard in many places, it is no longer the most effective maintenance strategy. In an increasingly data-driven and dynamic industry, rigid maintenance plans are becoming ineffective. Many of the alleged advantages turn out to be outdated or even counterproductive upon closer inspection.

Reduced risk of failure

Regular maintenance reduces the risk of sudden failures — but only within fixed intervals. Unexpected damage between maintenance dates remains a risk.

Longer life of systems

Only to a limited extent: Wear is detected, but often too late or too early. The measure is not based on the actual situation — but on the calendar.

Predictability

Fixed plans make processes predictable — but inflexible. When exposed to dynamic loads or changing production conditions, they quickly reach their limits.

Calculable costs

Although budgets can be planned, they are often excessive:
Maintenance is carried out on suspicion, even when there is no sign of wear and tear.

Disadvantages of Preventive Maintenance

High organizational effort: Planning, coordination and documentation of maintenance tie up personnel resources.

Production interruptions: When measures are poorly timed or are not tailored to requirements.

No strategic development: Without data-based evaluation, it is impossible to continuously improve maintenance strategies.

Inflexible maintenance despite variable use: Actual demands are ignored — this is inefficient and not demand-oriented.

Examples of the different maintenance strategies

Depending on the sector, machine type and production environment, different maintenance approaches are used:

Preventative Maintenance

In a food packaging line, the drive motor is serviced every 6 months — even if there are no abnormalities. This is intended to prevent failures, but functional parts are often replaced as a precautionary measure.

Predictive Maintenance

In a packaging company, the software detects an unusual deviation in the behavior of a warehouse block. The AI classifies this as incipient damage — even before the problem becomes acoustically or mechanically noticeable.

‍The affected component is specifically replaced during a planned maintenance window — without interruption of production or subsequent damage.

Reactive Maintenance

A conveyor roller in a quarry plant is only replaced when it is completely blocked. The result: production stoppage, high repair costs, and possibly even safety risks.

This is how Preventive Maintenance differentiates itself from other strategies

Preventive Maintenance differs in one key aspect in particular: It is time-based and not condition-oriented.
That means:

No real-time feedback from the machine

No learning from past failures

Interventions even without actual need

Conclusion: Preventive Maintenance is better than none at all — but it is only an intermediate step on the way to smart, data-driven maintenance.

The right maintenance strategy for your company

Choosing the right maintenance strategy is crucial — not only for the availability of your machines, but also for efficiency, planning reliability and cost control. Factors such as machine type, workload, production rhythms and budget framework play a central role.

But one thing is clear: Reactive measures are no longer enough. If you only act when something is broken, you risk unnecessary downtimes, high follow-up costs and the loss of valuable production time.
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Our Predictive Maintenance solution continuously analyses the real-time data of your machines and detects deviations from normal operation at an early stage. With the help of artificial intelligence, we develop an individual maintenance strategy that is exactly right for your systems — dynamic, precise and scalable.
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