5 Steps to Create a Preventive Maintenance Schedule

Preventive maintenance (PM) is the art of servicing your vehicles, machinery, and facility to reduce equipment failure and unplanned downtime. While many facility management leaders understand the benefits of preventive maintenance, acting on that knowledge and implementing a preventive maintenance schedule is challenging.

Like most things in life, planning ahead will help your facility save time and money in the long run, but it will also make the transition to preventive maintenance work as painless as possible. Let’s dive into the importance of a preventive maintenance schedule and how to get started!

What is a preventive maintenance schedule?

A preventive maintenance schedule is a planned list of regular maintenance tasks and inspections performed on assets to keep them in optimal working condition.

Putting a preventive maintenance schedule in place requires a maintenance manager or maintenance supervisor to balance the facilities and assets’ needs with the available resources. A well-constructed plan will have the following components in place:

• Precise instruction sets to guide technicians when performing maintenance and inspections
• Timelines that pinpoint when a maintenance activity should be completed and how frequently preventive maintenance should be performed
• Sufficient inventory and spare parts on hand in case a repair is needed

When putting a maintenance schedule together, it’s important to note your team’s skillset and availability to ensure you’re assigning the right staff to the task.

Preventive maintenance plan vs. preventive maintenance schedule

A preventive maintenance plan, or preventive maintenance program, is typically coordinated by the director of operations or similar. Its purpose is to align the company-wide goals with the maintenance team’s goals. A preventive maintenance plan focuses on what needs to be done.

On the other hand, a PM schedule is typically coordinated by the maintenance manager. Its purpose is to ensure the preventive maintenance plan is successfully executed. A preventive maintenance schedule focuses on when the work that needs to be done will get done and by whom.

Why is a preventive maintenance schedule important?

A preventive maintenance schedule provides your team with the structure and guidance it needs to be successful and keep your operations running smoothly. Here are a few of the main benefits:

• Reduce unscheduled downtime for your equipment
• Systemize the maintenance performed on your assets
• Increase team efficiency
• Increase asset and equipment lifespan

Establishing a preventive maintenance schedule—no matter the scale—can bring incredible benefits to your team and organization.

The different types of preventive maintenance schedules

There are several ways to schedule maintenance for your assets. Depending on the asset or how your team prefers to operate, you may choose a different type of schedule to run on. Let’s take a look at the various options.

Time-based schedules

Time-based PM schedules are centered around the calendar and are performed after a certain period of time has elapsed (e.g., three days, a week, a month, etc.). There are two different types of time-based schedules.

Fixed preventive maintenance

Fixed preventive maintenance scheduling occurs when you schedule maintenance at a specific time, regardless of when the last task was completed. Even if the last PM task was completed early or late, the next task is always set to occur at the same time.

Example: Say you have a work order that is supposed to be performed on the third of every month. Even if a maintenance technician completed that task or inspection on September 5th instead of September 3rd, when October rolls around, the maintenance will be scheduled for the 3rd.

Floating preventive maintenance

Floating preventive maintenance scheduling occurs when you schedule maintenance based on the last time the asset was serviced.

Example: If we use the same example above using a floating preventive maintenance schedule, because the technician completed the task on September 5th instead of the 3rd, the following maintenance task would be due on October 5th, or one month after the last task was executed.

Meter-based schedules

With a meter-based scheduling mindset, maintenance is triggered after a certain meter threshold is met (e.g., number of hours operated, miles driven, or production cycles performed).

While meter-based maintenance, or usage-based preventive maintenance, is intended to operate on a fixed schedule, it tends to gravitate towards a floating schedule more often than not. Let’s look at an example to see this in action.

Example: You schedule maintenance for your fleet every 3,000 miles. However, the likelihood that your fleet isn’t on site when it hits that 3,000-mile maintenance threshold is very high. Instead, you may have one vehicle that comes in for maintenance after 3,206 miles and another that comes in for maintenance after 2,817 miles. Instead of scheduling maintenance for those vehicles at the 6,000-mile mark, you would schedule it for 3,000 miles from whenever you last serviced the fleet.

How to create a preventive maintenance schedule

There are five main steps involved in creating a preventive maintenance schedule. Let’s take a look.

1. Take inventory of your assets

When taking inventory, it’s important to note that not all of your assets will require routine maintenance. When deciding whether or not to create a maintenance schedule, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is it critical to the success of your organization?
• Does it have failure modes that are preventable with regular maintenance and inspections?
• Is it more likely to fail as it ages?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should add it to your inventory list. While you’re taking inventory, be sure to document data for each asset. The most important items are the make, model, serial number, location, spare parts, and maintenance history.

You can store your inventory list on a spreadsheet or use maintenance management software to create a catalog of your assets.

2. Prioritize your assets

Setting preventive maintenance schedules for dozens to hundreds of assets takes time. It may take months to set service schedules for some of your equipment, so it’s important to prioritize your most essential assets first.

A systematic approach to prioritizing is calculating each asset’s risk priority number (RPN). It’s a fairly straightforward calculation.

Risk Priority Number = Severity x Occurrence x Detection

• Severity: This number is ranked from 1 to 10 (with 10 being more severe) and indicates how serious failure would be to your overall operations
• Occurrence: This number is ranked from 1 to 10 (with 10 being more likely to occur) and indicates the likelihood of an asset failing
• Detection: This number is ranked from 1 to 10 (with 10 being less likely to detect failure) and indicates the likelihood of detecting if an asset will fail

Once you’ve calculated the RPN for each asset, you can put the assets in rank order from highest RPN to lowest RPN.

3. Determine ideal preventive maintenance intervals

As mentioned above, each asset will require different maintenance intervals. Some will work best on a floating time-based schedule, whereas others will work best on a meter-based schedule. One risk associated with preventive maintenance is wasting time and resources “over-inspecting” assets. This step in the process is crucial to keep your team efficient and effective.

Use the asset’s manufacturing manual and historical equipment maintenance data to determine the appropriate maintenance interval for each piece of equipment.

4. Schedule recurring maintenance tasks

The most important part of setting up an effective preventive maintenance schedule is planning recurring tasks and inspections. There are several ways to schedule maintenance, from pen & paper to a spreadsheet to preventive maintenance software. Depending on your organization’s size and maintenance needs, one of those options may perform better than the others.

The easiest way to schedule recurring maintenance is with a software system. The system will allow you to schedule tasks for each asset and choose the appropriate maintenance interval. From there, you can add an instruction set and preventive maintenance checklist for your technicians to cross off while performing the maintenance. With preventive maintenance software, you can “set it and forget it” until it pops up on your calendar again! See if preventive maintenance software is a good option for your organization.

5. Monitor and improve your schedule

As with most things in life, it’s important to revisit your maintenance schedules regularly. For starters, make sure each asset is receiving maintenance as intended. From there, you can look at the failure frequency since implementing the preventive maintenance schedule. If it’s still failing frequently, you may want to adjust the frequency of maintenance. In addition, you may find that you’re performing routine maintenance too frequently and want to scale back.

Here are a few metrics for you to monitor:

• Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF): MTBF shows the average time between breakdowns for your assets. With an effective schedule in place, this number should increase. See how to calculate this metric.
• Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percent (SMPC): This metric indicates how late a preventive maintenance task is in relation to its due date. This will help you understand whether or not you have enough staff on board and help identify deficiencies. Learn more about SMCP and see how to calculate it.
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE): Like the name implies, OEE tracks how effective your equipment is. It takes into account the availability, performance, and quality of the equipment. Learn more about OEE.

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