How to Make a Preventive Maintenance Schedule

You know preventive maintenance is crucial for preventing equipment failure, but does the thought of juggling complex schedules and tracking countless work orders leave you feeling overwhelmed?

Don't worry, you're not alone! Many businesses struggle to create and maintain effective preventive maintenance schedules, missing out on key benefits like improved asset reliability and lifecycle, increased productivity, and decreased downtime.

In this guide, we'll walk you through how you can build a preventive maintenance schedule that keeps your critical equipment running smoothly, minimizes costly disruptions, and saves you time, money, and headaches in the long run.

What is a preventive maintenance schedule?

A preventive maintenance schedule is a plan for executing preventive maintenance work—it involves organizing company resources to ensure maintenance tasks are performed according to specific time or usage triggers.

Creating a preventive maintenance schedule involves more than just setting dates on a calendar. It requires a detailed understanding of your assets, resources, and facility as a whole. In addition, you’ll need to properly coordinate materials, work force, and timeframes for completing tasks. Dedicated maintenance schedulers, maintenance supervisors, and maintenance planners are the team members most often responsible for developing PM schedules.

With that said, don’t confuse maintenance scheduling with maintenance planning. Though the two processes support one another, they aren’t always completed by the same individual. Maintenance planning focuses on what needs to be done and how. Maintenance scheduling, on the other hand, details who will perform recommended maintenance tasks and when. Here, we explore maintenance scheduling, beginning with the various types of maintenance schedules.

Fixed vs. floating preventive maintenance schedules

Effective preventive maintenance schedules help facility managers efficiently allocate maintenance resources, effectively maintain assets, and appropriately plan for the year ahead. When making a preventive maintenance schedule, you have two primary options: fixed and floating PM scheduling.

1. Fixed PM schedules

A fixed preventive maintenance schedule is a routine maintenance plan scheduled according to specific equipment usage or time intervals. Fixed PM schedules focus on future planned tasks, regardless of whether previous tasks were completed or not. 

For instance, tasks scheduled on Mondays are always performed on Mondays regardless of whether your technician completed last week’s assigned task. Maintenance schedulers may also base recurring PMs on specific usage intervals or triggers.

EX: You schedule your fleet’s vehicles to undergo maintenance every 3,000 miles. Once an odometer reaches 3,000, you create a work order for a routine oil change and performance check. The vehicle’s next oil change will happen in another 3,000 miles. It doesn’t matter how long it takes your driver to reach the mileage. This is a fixed PM schedule based on usage intervals.

2. Floating PM schedules

A floating preventive maintenance schedule is a maintenance plan based on the timing of previous PM tasks. Floating PM schedules are informed by an asset’s past usage or maintenance history.

For instance, assume you have a 30-day PM schedule for a machine. You will assign the asset’s next PM 30 days from the completion of the last PM activity. In other words, the subsequent work order won’t be triggered until the previous work order has been completed and closed. Floating PM schedules require greater diligence than fixed PM schedules for tracking maintenance task completion. 

EX: You schedule an HVAC system for maintenance every 100 hours of operation. You delay maintenance until after the 120th hour. Therefore, your next work order will be triggered after 220 hours from the original PM. The system starts counting the 100 hours after the previous work order has been closed (at the 120th hour). If the HVAC system were on a fixed schedule, it would still get triggered for maintenance after 200 hours.

How to make (and implement) a preventive maintenance schedule

The key to creating a successful preventive maintenance schedule is identifying the right maintenance interval for each asset. This allows you to maximize resources while reducing the chance of unexpected breakdowns.

Here’s our step-by-step guide for how to make an effective preventive maintenance schedule:

1. Create an inventory of assets

Create an inventory of your organization’s most crucial assets. These are the pieces of equipment that should receive preventive maintenance first and foremost. This exercise will help you avoid delaying maintenance for certain assets, especially if using a floating PM schedule. 

Record the following data for each asset:

• Make and model 
• Serial number
• Specifications and capabilities
• Unit number
• Category
• Location
• Primary users
• Parts

You can use a spreadsheet or a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to catalog your asset entries. We recommend adopting a user-friendly platform like MaintainX to maintain asset records, cross-reference data, and glean cost-saving insights over time. 

2. Determine maintenance priorities

It’s important to remember that most of your facility’s assets don’t need to be scheduled for preventive maintenance. Exclusively performing PM on large asset inventories is unrealistic for most organizations. Additionally, performing PM on inexpensive, non-critical, and easily repaired items is wasteful. One way to determine PM priorities is to conduct a criticality analysis. 

A criticality analysis is an exercise that involves ranking assets according to their risk potential in several categories, including operational, financial, environmental, and health and safety. This process is beneficial to organizations with several complex assets because it removes personal bias from the equation. 

Criticality analyses allow managers to rank, prioritize, and schedule PMs with objectivity. Assets with higher criticality ratings should be given top priority. Use the following questions as a launchpad when evaluating asset criticality: 

• Which assets are critical to production and safety?
• Which assets require regular maintenance?
• Which assets have high repair and replacement costs?

When making your preventive maintenance schedule, prioritize assets that are essential for production, require regular maintenance, or have high repair and replacement costs. Remember: it’s more cost-efficient to place non-critical and older assets on reactive maintenance programs. You might be replacing them soon, after all.

3. Identify ideal preventive maintenance intervals

Of course, preventive maintenance isn’t without a potential downside. Without proper planning, you risk wasting precious resources on unnecessary inspections and repairs. Over-maintaining assets can be just as wasteful as under-maintaining them. Avoid overdoing it by identifying ideal PM ratios for your individual assets.

The three primary methods to determine PM intervals include: 

• Consulting equipment manufacturer’s manuals for recommended maintenance work instructions, schedules, and usage of critical spare parts
• Reviewing historical maintenance data for insights into past failure patterns
• Asking machine operators and technicians for their insights into asset behaviors

4. Schedule recurring work orders

According to the 2019 Plant Engineering Maintenance Survey, 45 and 39 percent of facilities still rely on in-house spreadsheets and paper records, respectively, for maintenance scheduling. 

Little do these organizations know just how much easier the right CMMS can make their maintenance scheduling. Modern, cloud-based CMMS platforms are scalable, affordable, and user-friendly.  The software allows you to automate both long-term maintenance schedules and short-term schedules based on quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily tasks. 

CMMS also allows you to capture minor maintenance activities that often fall through the cracks and go unnoticed. This enables teams to maintain backlogs at manageable levels. Additional features like inventory management, asset cross-referencing, work order commenting, team chat, and advanced reporting make MaintainX a game-changing tool for maintenance teams of all sizes.

5. Monitor progress

Lastly, periodically monitor the progress of your maintenance schedules and identify areas for improvement. Most importantly, evaluate how many PMs your team has completed since creating your initial maintenance schedules. Additionally, several metrics are available to track the progress of your PM program, including: 

• Mean time between failure (MTBF): MTBF is the average time between asset breakdowns. Use MTBF to measure the performance, design, and safety of critical assets. The formula to calculate MTBF is: Total uptime of repairable asset ÷ number of failures within a set period.
• Planned maintenance percentage (PMP): PMP measures how many scheduled maintenance activities have been completed compared to your overall number of maintenance tasks. Use PMP to measure the effectiveness of your PM scheduling and identify opportunities to minimize reactive maintenance. 
• Scheduled maintenance critical percent (SMCP): This metric measures how late a recurring maintenance activity is in relation to how often it should be done. SMCP helps determine overdue maintenance activities ripe for prioritization. The formula to calculate SMCP is: (number of days a task is overdue + length of the maintenance cycle) ÷ length of the maintenance cycle x 100.
• Preventive maintenance compliance (PMC): This metric measures how many scheduled tasks have been completed within a given period. It’s also useful for determining PM schedule effectiveness. The formula to calculate PMC is: number of completed PMs ÷ number of scheduled PMs x 100.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): OEE measures the level of productivity for an asset. It combines asset availability, performance, and production quality to determine the efficiency of an asset in production. An asset with an OEE of 100 percent doesn’t experience any unplanned downtimes (availability), produces as fast as possible (performance), and doesn’t have any defects (quality).

Why preventive maintenance schedules fail

Preventive maintenance scheduling isn’t rocket science. However, several challenges can disrupt workflows, reduce schedule compliance, and create bottlenecks if not proactively navigated. Some common factors that disrupt PM schedules are:

Poor team communication

An effective preventive maintenance schedule relies on all responsible parties having the necessary information to execute it. Unclear communication among teams, departments, and management can lead to gaps in critical information such as equipment status, inventory, and more. This can lead to misaligned priorities, redundant tasks, and confusion about what work needs to be done, where, and by whom. To avoid these issues, seek out solutions that facilitate robust and real-time communication across teams, such as a mobile CMMS with real-time messaging.

Inefficient maintenance inventory management

Preventive maintenance schedules end up being useless if teams don’t have the necessary materials to perform them when they need to. An absence of spare parts or tools can delay not only a specific task but other tasks that rely on its completion. This inefficiency can lead to extended equipment downtime, a backlog of tasks, and the increased likelihood of rush orders and emergency repairs. Digitizing your inventory management with a CMMS can help prevent stockouts, expensive rush orders, and extended downtime.

Lack of in-house skills for specialized tasks

Depending on the specific facility and assets in consideration, preventive maintenance can sometimes require specialized skills. If a company lacks these skills in-house, it may struggle to complete certain maintenance tasks on a reliable schedule, leading to outsourcing, increased costs, and potential delays in the maintenance schedule.

Inconsistent maintenance practices

Inconsistencies in how teams perform maintenance tasks can lead to uneven results and unreliable equipment performance. If technicians follow different procedures or lack standardization, it's likely that some preventive measures will be missed or improperly executed. To get ahead of this, create and implement clear standard operating procedures (SOPs) that ensure technicians are following dependable steps every time.

4 tips for preventive maintenance scheduling success

1. Set clear procedures

One major factor hindering preventive maintenance schedules is a lack of clarity on the maintenance work. Technicians can’t stick to a schedule if they first need to find out what exactly they need to do or how to do it. By providing detailed and robust standard operating procedures, you can ensure technicians can follow schedules without delays or confusion about their tasks.

2. Leverage software

Optimize your preventive maintenance scheduling by using software to eliminate delays and confusion associated with pen-and-paper processes. Digital preventive maintenance scheduling with a mobile-first CMMS ensures technicians receive crucial information about maintenance work ahead of time instead of waiting to read printed-out or written schedules. Digital SOPs and procedure libraries provide important reference points for technicians seeking guidance. In addition, instant messaging ensures managers can share and receive updates in real time.

3. Optimize inventory

Without robust and reliable inventory data, teams will find it difficult to maintain efficient inventory levels of parts necessary for maintenance work. To avoid technicians being unable to perform maintenance work due to unavailable parts, implement robust inventory management processes. The right software can also make all the difference here. MaintainX’s parts management module, for example, provides features to help you track inventory, set automatic low-quantity alerts, and never stock out again.

4. Monitor performance

However carefully you craft your preventive maintenance schedule at the outset, it’s unlikely you’ll have no room for improvement. Successful preventive maintenance requires constantly fine-tuning your plans and schedules. Monitor your performance by tracking KPIs, analyzing the data, and adjusting your schedules as needed. MaintainX, for example, contains a robust reporting module that analyses your data to generate actionable insights. You’ll be able to tell what activities you need to perform more frequently and which you can perform less.

Simplify PM scheduling with MaintainX

If you’re wondering how to get around the challenges of preventive maintenance scheduling, you don’t have to do it alone. MaintainX can help you create and implement effective PM schedules. Here are some features that can support you.

Asset health insights

One crucial element for creating an effective preventive maintenance schedule is finding the right balance between too much or too little maintenance. Too little maintenance and the program yields no benefits, but too much maintenance can result in wasted efforts and resources. MaintainX’s in-depth reporting provides actionable insights into metrics like Mean Time Between Failure and Mean Time To Repair. By analyzing this data, MaintainX helps you to optimize your maintenance scheduling. You’ll be able to determine which assets require more frequent maintenance work and the ones that need less attention.

Resource planning with labor insights

Just as striking the right balance for maintenance work is critical, you also need to find optimal ways to apply your human resources. Knowing who to assign maintenance work and when can be difficult for maintenance managers, especially when you have to go over schedules manually to understand people’s historical workloads. MaintainX preventive maintenance software offers work scheduling tool that helps optimize your work management based on labor insights and smart estimates. You’ll get a complete picture of your team’s workload and capacity so you can prioritize, assign work orders, and make real-time adjustments.

Recurring work orders

Planning out a maintenance schedule is one thing, but without the right implementation tools, your efforts risk getting wasted. MaintainX helps teams avoid missed schedules and incomplete work by offering tools to automate your maintenance scheduling. Repeatable work orders and mobile notifications help team members ensure they know what to do and when. Checklists, templates, procedures, and work instructions also ensure team members know exactly how to perform their tasks.

Meter-based preventive maintenance

In addition to helping you execute your own preventive maintenance schedule, MaintainX also facilitates preventive maintenance on a meter-based schedule. By using MaintainX, you can automatically trigger preventive maintenance work based on meter readings—technicians can carry out maintenance work after time used, mileage, or any other readings you choose.

Ready to optimize your preventive maintenance scheduling? Get started with MaintainX today!