Preventive Maintenance: What it is and How to implement it in your Industry 

Preventive maintenance is one of the most traditional — and indispensable — strategies for ensuring the availability and reliability of industrial assets. Even with the advancement of predictive technologies, scheduling interventions based on time or usage remains fundamental to prevent failures and keep operations running at full capacity.

In other words, preventive maintenance remains relevant. More than that, it forms the foundation of any robust asset management strategy. However, for it to function efficiently, it requires more than just a schedule — it demands structured planning, well-defined criteria, and integration with tools that help visualize the actual behavior of equipment.

Therefore, in this article, you will understand what preventive maintenance is, how to implement it in practice, its main benefits and limitations, and how this approach relates to other types of maintenance, such as corrective, predictive, and prescriptive. Additionally, we’ve gathered real-world examples of its application in industry, answered the most frequent questions, and shown how technology can take your maintenance strategy to a new level.

What is Preventive Maintenance in Industry?

Preventive maintenance is a systematic approach to industrial maintenance based on scheduled inspections, tests, adjustments, and replacements of machine and equipment components, with the goal of preventing failures before they occur. It follows a schedule defined by time, operating cycles, or technical parameters recommended by manufacturers and specialists.

This strategy applies to various types of equipment maintenance, ensuring that assets remain operating within ideal performance and safety standards. The logic is simple: instead of waiting for a defect to happen, the technical team acts proactively, as in the periodic overhaul of an electric motor or the scheduled lubrication of bearings.

Furthermore, to perform preventive maintenance efficiently, the technical team must combine their expertise with structured planning, failure history, and well-defined criteria for each type of asset. 

Why is Preventive Maintenance important? 

Adopting a well-structured preventive maintenance plan is essential for any company looking to increase asset availability, optimize costs, and reduce operational risks. Here are the main reasons to implement this strategy: 

• Reduced Unplanned Downtime: Planning interventions mitigates unexpected interruptions in the production line, which can lead to delivery delays, rework, raw material waste, and revenue loss, for example.
• Increased Asset Lifespan: By preserving the proper functioning of components, accelerated wear and the need for premature asset replacements are avoided, which translates into long-term savings. 
• Personnel and Process Safety: Technical failures in industrial equipment can jeopardize the physical integrity of employees and cause serious accidents. Therefore, preventive maintenance acts as an additional barrier to prevent these occurrences. 
• Standardization and Traceability: With well-documented routines, it’s possible to control the history of interventions, ensure compliance with regulatory standards, and facilitate technical audits. 
• Improved Operational Predictability: By scheduling equipment maintenance actions, companies can predict and allocate resources more efficiently, reducing the need for emergency hires, last-minute purchases, or disruptions. 
• Indirect Savings: Even though it requires initial investments in specialized labor and scheduled parts replacement, preventive maintenance avoids higher costs associated with corrective maintenance, such as collateral damage to other systems, prolonged shutdowns, or contractual penalties. 

Impacts on Costs, Safety, and Productivity 

In addition to preventing failures, preventive maintenance contributes significantly to the overall performance of operations. Its effects directly impact three essential areas of industry: 

1. Operational Costs 

• Reduced spending on emergency maintenance;
• Lower consumption of spare parts on an urgent basis;
• Decreased idleness of the technical team.

2. Safety

• Lower risk of accidents resulting from unexpected failures;
• More controlled and safer environment for operators and machine;
• Compliance with occupational safety standards and legal requirements.

3. Productivity

• Increased operational efficiency by keeping equipment fully operational;
• Reduced downtime due to failures;
• Planning interventions during strategic times, such as lower-load shifts or maintenance windows.

In summary, the value of preventive maintenance lies in transforming equipment maintenance from a reactive process into a controlled practice.

Examples of Preventive Maintenance applied in Industry

Different types of preventive maintenance exist, varying according to the monitored asset, equipment criticality, and technical operating parameters. Below, we’ve compiled some examples of preventive maintenance applied in routine industrial maintenance:

• Electric Motors: Periodic inspection of bearings, cleaning of fans, retightening of electrical connections, and brush replacement, according to estimated usage time. These actions prevent overheating and friction-related failures. 

• Reducers*: Scheduled verification of lubricating oil level and quality, inspection of gears, and assessment of mechanical play are common preventive actions. (*link temporarily in Portuguese.)

• Bearings: Preventive lubrication, noise analysis, and replacement in regular cycles. Even in good visual condition, this component can fail due to fatigue if not regularly inspected. 
• Pumps: Review of seals, checking of couplings, and alignment of shafts at programmed intervals. These measures prevent leaks and reduce the risk of collapse due to wear.

Additionally, other equipment such as compressors, conveyors, electrical panels, and hydraulic systems should also be included in the plant’s preventive maintenance plan.

Differentiating between planned and emergency examples

Preventive maintenance includes two types of actions: planned interventions, foreseen in the operation schedule, and emergency interventions, which arise from an inspection identifying signs of imminent failure. Both are preventive — as they occur before the failure materializes — but differ in timing and execution. See below: 

Example of a planned intervention: 

The replacement of a reducer’s lubricating oil is scheduled every 1,000 hours of operation, according to the manufacturer’s recommendation. The technical team organizes in advance, with parts and tools available, performing the shutdown in a controlled manner with reduced impact on production. 

Example of an Emergency Intervention: 

During a preventive inspection on a pump, the technician detects an abnormal noise and identifies the onset of cavitation. Therefore, even with maintenance scheduled for a week later, the team anticipates the intervention to prevent more severe damage, without waiting for the failure, but acting outside the initial schedule.

Understanding this difference is essential for structuring a coherent preventive strategy. However, it’s important to consider the limits of this model in more complex industrial scenarios. In plants with hundreds of assets, for example, relying exclusively on inspection routines requires an extensive and highly synchronized team — which is rarely feasible. Furthermore, failures can emerge between checks, affecting multiple pieces of equipment before anyone notices. 

In this sense, preventive maintenance is indeed an essential starting point. But as operations grow, uncovered areas increase: less time for each inspection, a higher probability of undetected failures, and more risks to productivity. Therefore, relying solely on this type of intervention might seem like a solution, but it tends to bring more losses than long-term returns.

Advantages and limitations of Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is the first step within a planned maintenance strategy. As an evolution of the corrective approach, it allows for minimizing problems and failures based on time intervals or asset usage.

Additionally, it provides greater predictability in maintenance routines, contributes to equipment health, and reduces unplanned downtime. However, its coverage operates based on estimations rather than continuous data on asset condition, which can lead to unnecessary or late interventions.

Therefore, it’s important to remember that despite being an essential foundation, preventive maintenance has limitations that must be considered when defining the ideal plan for a plant. Unlike predictive or prescriptive maintenance, preventive maintenance does not offer continuous visibility into asset health.

For this reason, it should be applied judiciously and, whenever possible, integrated with technologies that enhance its precision and coverage.

In this sense, the comparison above helps visualize that preventive maintenance sits between the reactivity of corrective maintenance and the intelligence of predictive maintenance, often serving as the first step in the evolution of asset management maturity.

Practical benefits of Preventive Maintenance

Adopting preventive maintenance as part of a company’s strategy brings significant gains to operations, especially when applied in a planned manner, with well-defined criteria, and based on failure history and asset criticality. Therefore, the benefits go beyond simply reducing downtime: they involve the entire maintenance value chain, from planning to the final performance of the equipment.

Among the main benefits are: 

Reduced failures compared to Corrective Maintenance

Preventive maintenance allows for scheduling inspections and interventions before failures occur, representing a significant advance over the corrective approach, which only acts after a breakdown. While it doesn’t eliminate all risks, it helps reduce the frequency and severity of failures, especially in assets with predictable behavior. Thus, by avoiding reliance on emergency actions, companies gain more operational stability and reduce costs associated with unexpected shutdowns. 

Greater predictability in asset management

With a well-defined schedule, the technical team has greater control over when and how equipment will be inspected or repaired. This facilitates production planning and materials logistics. 

Possibility of planned downtime  

One of the major advantages is the ability to align maintenance with periods of lower demand or technical windows, minimizing the impact on productivity and avoiding unexpected operational interruptions.

In practice, the benefits of preventive maintenance in industry are directly perceived in the day-to-day operation: more control and a predictable technical routine. 

Limitations of Preventive Maintenance 

Although preventive maintenance offers numerous benefits for industrial operations, it also presents limitations that need to be considered when planning the strategy. Below, we highlight the main challenges of this approach:

Risk of unnecessary maintenance

Since actions are performed according to estimated time or usage, there’s a risk of replacing components that are still in good condition, generating costs that could be avoided with more precise data.

Lack of continuous asset health monitoring

Preventive maintenance doesn’t capture subtle changes in equipment behavior between one inspection and another. Furthermore, it’s important to consider that preventive maintenance is often performed with the asset shut down for safety reasons. This means it’s not possible to identify signals that only emerge during the machine’s full operation. Consequently, your company limits its ability to detect evolving failures or events that occur outside scheduled cycles.

Therefore, while it’s a fundamental step in the evolution of asset management, preventive maintenance should be applied judiciously, adjusted to the plant’s reality, and, whenever possible, integrated with predictive monitoring solutions that allow intervention based on real signs of deterioration.

Professionals constantly exposed to risk

During preventive interventions, technicians need to be physically close to the assets — which, by itself, represents a higher risk of accidents. This is aggravated in cases where the equipment cannot be shut down, such as conveyor belts, for example. In these situations, inspections for alignment, tension, and wear of rollers and belts are done with the system in motion, requiring heightened attention.

Additionally, this type of maintenance doesn’t always involve disassembly. Often, it’s limited to visual inspections, cleaning, lubrication, or minor scheduled adjustments.

Preventive vs. Predictive Maintenance: Which is best for your operation? 

As industrial maintenance maturity advances, many companies face a strategic decision: maintain focus on preventive maintenance, migrate to predictive maintenance, or combine both approaches?

The truth is, there’s no single answer. The choice between preventive and predictive maintenance depends on the operation profile, asset criticality, resource availability, and the team’s technical capacity.

* The DOE (U.S. Department of Energy) reports that predictive maintenance can provide: 

• 25% to 30% reduction in maintenance costs.
• 70% to 75% decrease in unplanned downtime. 
• 35% to 45% reduction in machine idle time.

When to adopt each? 

Preventive maintenance is most suitable when:

• Equipment has well-defined failure cycles;
• The company is still structuring its maintenance management system;
• Assets are not extremely critical or sensitive;
• The available budget does not support more advanced technologies;
• There’s a need for process standardization and traceability.

Predictive maintenance is recommended when:

• Assets are critical, and failures represent a high financial or safety impact;
• There’s significant variation in equipment behavior;
• The company already has greater data maturity;
• There’s a desire to further reduce unnecessary maintenance costs;
• There’s interest in automating alerts and decisions based on real-time data;
• The goal is to increase workplace safety by anticipating failures that could jeopardize employee integrity;
• The objective is to improve return on investment (ROI) by extending asset lifespan and reducing operational costs;
• The aim is to optimize productivity by minimizing unplanned downtime and keeping assets in continuous operation;
• The goal is to preserve asset health by identifying and correcting problems in early stages to prevent greater damage.

Adopting both strategies is the best choice when: 

• The plant has assets with different criticality levels;
• Preventive maintenance acts as a baseline, and predictive maintenance complements strategic assets;
• There’s a skilled technical team capable of interpreting data and adapting maintenance planning based on insights.

How technology enhances industrial maintenance 

As previously discussed, preventive maintenance already represents an advancement over the corrective approach. However, being based on fixed intervals, it can lead to unnecessary or belated interventions. To overcome these limitations, predictive maintenance offers a more precise alternative, utilizing sensors and smart systems to continuously monitor assets and guide decisions based on operational data.

Thus, predictive maintenance relies on three technological pillars: 

• IoT (Internet of Things) Sensors: Installed on assets, these devices capture data such as vibration, temperature, electric current, and voltage, allowing for continuous monitoring of asset health during operation.
• Connectivity and Automation: Through gateways and wired or wireless networks, data is automatically sent to digital platforms. This eliminates the need for manual collection and streamlines the diagnostic process.
• Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence: Specialized software processes the collected signals, identifies anomalies, and suggests corrective actions based on historical patterns and predictive models. Consequently, it’s possible to foresee failures in advance and prioritize interventions according to risk.

With these tools, maintenance moves beyond being just a schedule and transforms into a smart, dynamic strategy, aligned with the operational reality of each piece of equipment.

Companies like Dynamox offer complete solutions for this transformation, with wired and wireless sensors, automated data collection, and integrated platforms for industrial asset analysis and management. This enables your company to enhance predictability, reduce failures, and improve operational performance. 

Frequently asked questions about Preventive Maintenance (FAQ)

What’s the ideal frequency for performing preventive maintenance? 

There’s no single answer—the ideal frequency depends on the type of equipment, the operating environment, and asset criticality. Generally, we recommend the following:

• Manufacturer guidelines (for example: oil change every 5,000 hours);
• Plant failure history;
• Specific usage conditions (for example: exposure to dust, humidity, overload).

Additionally, it’s crucial to review and adjust the periodicity based on real data as your company advances in maintenance maturity.

Which equipment benefits most from preventive maintenance?

Preventive equipment maintenance is especially effective for assets with: 

• Moving components subjected to mechanical wear (bearings, couplings, gears);
• Estimable service life based on operating cycles or usage time, allowing for an estimation of aging and failure risk;
• Low criticality, where continuous monitoring isn’t technically or economically feasible.

Typical examples include: 

• Auxiliary equipment or equipment with less impact, such as small electric motors or local fans;
• Pumps and reducers with standardized use and stable environments, without significant load variations;
• Non-critical conveyors or material handling systems with a reliable history of wear-related failures;

However, be aware! For critical assets or those prone to unpredictable failures, predictive maintenance with continuous sensor monitoring tends to offer better cost-benefit and higher operational reliability.

What are the risks of preventive maintenance? 

Despite its benefits, preventive maintenance also carries risks if not well-planned:

• Unnecessary interventions: Replacing parts in good condition leads to waste and excessive costs;
• False sense of security: The schedule might lead the team to ignore failure signs that emerge between inspections;
• Uncoordinated interruptions: When poorly scheduled, maintenance can negatively impact production or coincide with critical periods.

Therefore, preventive maintenance should be applied based on criticality analysis, failure curves, and operational history, integrated into an asset management strategy that combines corrective actions, predictive actions, and smart inspections.

Which tools can be used for control? 

Efficient preventive maintenance control can be achieved with tools such as:

• CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) to register assets, schedule inspections, track work orders, and maintain intervention history. ;
• Well-structured technical spreadsheets for companies in early stages;
• Key maintenance indicators like MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), MTTR (Mean Time to Repair), and availability rate;
• Complementary predictive solutions, such as Dynamox sensors and platforms, which help validate or revise preventive routines based on real asset data.

An example is DynaPortable, a mobile sensor that an inspector positions on the machine with a magnetic base to collect vibration data. With it, you can create inspection checklists in the app and record everything with geolocation, ensuring more control over what was done and where. Moreover, the information is sent to the platform, giving managers greater visibility and analytical power over asset health. .

Discover Dynamox Solutions to elevate your company’s maintenance 

Dynamox is an industrial technology company specialized in asset health and performance monitoring, operating in over 25 countries. We develop complete predictive maintenance solutions, combining IoT sensors, communication gateways, and a robust data analysis platform—all to help you make more precise decisions, reduce failures, and ensure safer operations. 

If your company already uses preventive maintenance, you’re on the right track. However, with predictive maintenance, your company transforms data into intelligence and achieves a new level of efficiency.

Our solutions include:

• Smart wired and wireless sensors (DynaLoggers) for continuous monitoring of vibration, temperature, and more;
• Portable sensor (DynaPortable) for quick routes, with low initial investment;
• Current and voltage sensor (Enging technology) for early diagnostics in electrical equipment;
• Gateways (DynaGateway) for automated and remote data collection;
• DynaPredict Platform for failure analysis, alerts, and visual asset management;
• Artificial Intelligence (DynaDetect) for automated diagnostics and intervention prioritization.

More than just preventing failures, the goal is to anticipate them, with reliable and continuous data, faster decisions, and concrete operational gains.

Talk to our specialists to learn how we can elevate your maintenance to the next level!