ProActive Maintenance

ProActive Maintenance is a schedule of planned maintenance actions aimed at the prevention of breakdowns and failures. The primary goal of ProActive Maintenance is to prevent the failure of equipment before it actually occurs. It is designed to preserve and enhance equipment reliability by monitoring and maintaining applications and hardware before they actually fail. ProActive Maintenance activities include equipment checks, partial and or complete replacement at specified periods, 24x7 monitoring, preventive maintenance and so on. In addition, we can record equipment deterioration so you know to replace or repair worn parts or applications before they cause system failure. Virtual IT Solutions technological advances in tools for diagnosis have enabled even more accurate and effective application and equipment maintenance. Our ProActive Maintenance program will prevent 99% of failures before they occur.

Value of ProActive Maintenance

There are multiple misconceptions about ProActive Maintenance. One such misconception is that ProActive Maintenance is unduly costly. This logic dictates that it would cost more for regularly scheduled downtime and maintenance than it would normally cost to operate equipment until repair is absolutely necessary. This may be true for some components; however, one should compare not only the costs but the long-term benefits and savings associated with ProActive Maintenance. Without ProActive Maintenance, for example, costs for lost production time from unscheduled equipment breakdown will be incurred. Also, ProActive Maintenance will result in savings due to an increase of effective system service life.

Long-term benefits of ProActive Maintenance include:

Improved system reliability.
Decreased cost of onsite repair.
Decreased system downtime.
Better inventory and cost management.

Long-term effects and cost comparisons usually favor ProActive Maintenance over performing maintenance actions only when the system fails.

When Does ProActive Maintenance Make Sense

ProActive Maintenance is a logical choice if, and only if, the following two conditions are met:

Condition #1: The component in question has a possible failure rate. In other words, the failure rate of the component increases with time, thus implying down time. ProActive Maintenance of a component that is assumed to have an exponential distribution (which implies a constant failure rate) does not make sense!
Condition #2: The overall cost of the ProActive Maintenance action must be less than the overall cost of a corrective action. (Note: In the overall cost for a corrective action, one should include ancillary tangible and/or intangible costs, such as downtime costs, loss of production costs, lawsuits over the failure of a safety-critical item, etc.)

If both of these conditions are met, then ProActive Maintenance makes sense. Additionally, based on the costs ratios, an optimum time for such action can be easily computed for a single component.

The Fallacy of "Constant Failure Rate" and "Preventive Replacement"

Even though we alluded to the fact in the last section, availability, it is important to make it explicitly clear that if a component has a constant failure rate, then ProActive Maintenance of the component will have no effect on the component's and the downtime occurred. To illustrate this, consider a device with a down time ratio = 100 hours, or λ = 0.01, and with ProActive Maintenance every 50 hours. The reliability vs. time graph for this case is illustrated in the below figure, the device is maintained every 50 hours, thus the devices reliability is reset to one. At first glance, it may seem that the ProActive Maintenance action is actually maintaining the component at a higher reliability.

Now imagine that the ProActive Maintenance is occurring 24x7x365. The graph would display close to 100% reliability with hardly any drop. That is what Virtual IT Solution, LLC can offer your company, and that is why we are the number one IT Service - Managed Solutions Provider in the business.