The difference between a facility that’s thriving and a facility that’s constantly battling equipment failures often comes down to one factor: the structure of their building maintenance plans.
Whether you're starting from scratch or improving the plan you've got, here's how to build a strategy that helps you cut downtime and control costs. We'll cover everything from cataloging your assets and setting priorities to tracking performance once your plan is up and running.
Key takeaways
- A building maintenance plan shifts your team's focus from reactive repairs to proactive, scheduled maintenance. Ultimately, this helps reduce costs and unplanned downtime.
- The first step in building a successful plan is creating a complete inventory of your building's critical assets.
- Prioritize your maintenance tasks with a criticality analysis. This keeps your efforts focused on assets that have the biggest impact on operations and safety.
- Use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to automate work order creation, track maintenance history, and monitor key performance indicators like planned maintenance percentage.
What is a building maintenance plan?
A building maintenance plan is an approach to maintaining facility assets through scheduled inspections, preventive tasks, and organized work orders. The right plan helps teams stay within budget while focusing on what matters most: keeping critical assets running.
Benefits of a building maintenance plan
A formal building maintenance plan provides the structure teams need to move from firefighting to proactive, strategic facility maintenance. The payoff is less scrambling and a maintenance budget you can actually predict.
Less unplanned downtime
A good building maintenance plan incorporates scheduled inspections and service, which allows teams to identify potential issues before catastrophic failures happen. For manufacturing facilities, this proactive approach keeps production lines online and minimizes costly shutdowns.
Lower maintenance costs
The cost of planned maintenance is generally less than the cost of emergency repairs (which often involve premium labor rates and expedited parts shipping). With a structured plan, maintenance managers can control budgets by reducing unexpected breakdowns.
Longer asset lifespan
With consistent care, equipment runs more efficiently and lasts longer. For facilities with high-value production equipment, this maximizes return on investment and delays expensive replacements.
Improved safety and compliance
A structured plan makes sure teams regularly inspect safety systems like fire alarms, sprinklers, and emergency lighting. When your team documents these regular inspections in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), you get clear audit trails for regulatory compliance.
Balancing reactive maintenance vs. preventive maintenance
Smart building maintenance finds the sweet spot between reactive and preventive work—enough prevention to avoid most emergencies without overdoing it.
PM reduces the frequency and cost of reactive repairs by completing low-cost tasks regularly. Villages Golf and Country Club demonstrated this by boosting preventive work by 116% while decreasing reactive work by 30%.
For example, $10 repairs on leaky toilets save significant money on your next water bill. Unfortunately, maintenance departments often perform costly repairs because they lack a structured preventive maintenance plan.
4 simple steps to creating a preventive building maintenance plan
1. Inventory your building's assets
First, you'll need to decide what equipment to include in your preventive maintenance program. Walk through your building to catalog every piece of equipment you'll maintain.
Make sure to document hidden systems like electrical infrastructure, HVAC systems, and outside drainage systems.
Record the following data for each building asset:
- Make and model
- Serial number
- Specifications and capabilities
- Unit number
- Category
- Location
- Primary users
- Parts
2. Establish priorities and maintenance frequency
Priorities
One way to determine your PM priorities is to conduct a criticality analysis. For building maintenance, ask yourself:
- What is the expected return on investment of this equipment?
- Which inexpensive equipment can follow a more reactive run-to-failure model?
- What equipment is causing the most disruptions to your department?
Maintenance frequency
To figure out how frequently to schedule your preventive maintenance tasks, refer to manufacturer guidelines, speak with experienced maintenance technicians, and review historical maintenance data.
Maintenance software like MaintainX can make determining this frequency easier because it allows you to quickly view past maintenance records and asset information (without digging through spreadsheets or filing cabinets).
3. Create a work order system
All maintenance activities start with a work order, so a good work order system is at the core of any effective maintenance schedule.
The following shows how a proactive maintenance department can use work order software to more easily organize maintenance tasks.
- Create work orders for all tasks: Your team should create work orders for every task, from routine maintenance to inspections. When you have a record of every work order in your CMMS, it puts historical data at your fingertips. This data will help you make quick decisions and identify cost-saving opportunities later.
- Prioritize your work orders: Consider how much time a maintenance task will take, where it fits with other priorities, and any operational considerations that impact scheduling (e.g. a maintenance activity may require a planned power outage or special equipment).
- Automate work orders for recurring preventive maintenance: You can enter PM frequencies for different tasks right in your CMMS. The app can then generate a calendar and automatically issue work orders to technicians on their mobile devices before each scheduled job.
- Include standard operating procedures and additional preventive maintenance procedures on work orders: Standard operating procedure (SOP) templates help your team save time and reduce errors by giving them consistent instructions on how to complete a task. A modern CMMS can automatically attach procedures for each piece of equipment to your work orders.
- Review, then repair: Building maintenance workers should review equipment and work order history in their CMMS before starting maintenance. This historical information can help technicians diagnose issues and decide whether to repair or replace.
- Document and close: When a technician completes a maintenance work order, it’s time-stamped, and they can upload photos of the repairs before they close it out. This gives others clearer context on what was accomplished. Plus, a CMMS with real-time monitoring allows facility managers to keep closer tabs on all work orders.
4. Monitor your progress and adjust accordingly
CMMS software can help you track your maintenance progress and provide reports on key performance indicators (KPIs).
Here are a couple of important KPIs to consider for your program:
Planned maintenance percentage
Planned maintenance percentage (PMP) compares the number of maintenance tasks you have planned to the total number of tasks completed. This helps you identify opportunities to minimize reactive maintenance.
To calculate PMP, divide the total hours your team spent on planned maintenance by the total hours they spent on all maintenance within a given period. Then multiply the number by 100 to get your PMP percentage.
PMP = (Total hours of planned maintenance / Total hours of ALL maintenance) * 100
Mean time between failures
Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the average time that’s passed between asset breakdowns.
If an asset experiences frequent failures, you may need to increase PM frequency. Assets that never break down might operate successfully with less frequent maintenance.
To calculate MTBF, divide the total uptime of an asset by the number of times it’s failed within a given period.
MTBF = Total uptime / Number of failures
The final word on building your maintenance plan
A solid building maintenance plan is your first step toward running a safer, more cost-effective operation.
Building maintenance plan steps summary
The right CMMS gives you the digital tools to turn your plan into action. Ready to move from planning to doing? Sign up for free to explore how MaintainX can help you build.
Building Maintenance Plan FAQs
What does a building maintenance plan include for manufacturing facilities?
A comprehensive building maintenance plan for manufacturing includes asset inventories, preventive maintenance schedules, standard operating procedures, and parts inventory lists. It should also cover compliance and performance tracking.
How can maintenance managers prioritize assets in their industrial maintenance plans?
Maintenance managers can use a criticality analysis to evaluate each asset's impact on production, safety, and repair costs. Many apply the 80/20 rule, focusing efforts on the 20% of assets responsible for 80% of maintenance issues.
How often should maintenance managers update facility maintenance plans for manufacturing operations?
At minimum, maintenance teams should review manufacturing facility maintenance plans annually. More frequent updates may be necessary (e.g. when new equipment has been installed, or if data shows recurring failures that point to opportunities to improve the plans).
The MaintainX team is made up of maintenance and manufacturing experts. They’re here to share industry knowledge, explain product features, and help workers get more done with MaintainX!
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