Preventive maintenance (PM) is an approach to asset management and facilities management that relies heavily on planning, coordination, and collaboration. These features are essential to the performance of preventive maintenance activities such as routine inspections, preemptive equipment maintenance, and parts replacements. Your maintenance schedule is what makes it possible to effectively plan, coordinate, and carry out these activities.
A preventive maintenance schedule gives you the ability to complete maintenance tasks at predetermined time-based intervals, allocate the required labor resources, anticipate inventory needs, and more.
Why preventive maintenance scheduling is important
The objective of your preventive maintenance program is to prevent breakdowns, minimize downtime, and improve asset tracking to extend the life of your equipment. Your maintenance schedule is key to achieving this objective. It’s an important tool for helping to anticipate workload, inventory needs, planned downtime for repairs, and more.
However, there is a lot that goes into maintenance scheduling. The intervals between activities like inspections, cleaning, and replacement of spare parts must be determined with the help of accurate data and well-chosen Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics. This is why a growing number of businesses rely on preventive maintenance scheduling solutions as part of their maintenance management software suites to calendarize and manage preventive maintenance activities.
Below, we’ll take a closer look at the important role that scheduling plays in preventive maintenance as well as the benefits of leveraging PM scheduling software to support your maintenance operations.
How does scheduled maintenance work?
Your maintenance schedule should work as a basic guide to asset management for your maintenance department. Maintenance scheduling outlines the activities necessary to keep equipment running optimally and reliably while identifying the personnel and resources needed to carry out these activities.
Below, we take a closer look at how organizations typically design and deploy preventive maintenance scheduling.
Designing and deploying maintenance scheduling
Every organization has different asset management and facility maintenance needs and capabilities, which can shape specific elements of a maintenance schedule. However, most organizations will typically follow a process like this for preventive maintenance management:
- Take inventory of your assets, compiling a comprehensive list of all equipment and machinery requiring maintenance.
- Conduct a criticality assessment, prioritizing assets based on their importance to business operations, their susceptibility to malfunction, and the frequency with which servicing is needed.
- Identify optimal servicing intervals, using manufacturer recommendations, historical data, equipment performance indicators, and regulatory requirements.
- Leverage digital tools such as Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) to help automate scheduling, inventory management, and work order tracking. With helpful dashboards, these cloud-based platforms make it simple to stay organized and efficient by consolidating essential documents like checklists and templates. A mobile CMMS offers additional benefits, keeping teams connected across facilities and making reviewing asset history as simple as scanning a QR code or barcode.
- Provide comprehensive employee training, ensuring maintenance technicians are aligned in their adherence to the maintenance schedule and that all relevan parties know how to effectively leverage PM scheduling software.
The benefits of an effective preventive maintenance schedule
A comprehensive maintenance schedule is a cornerstone of an effective preventive maintenance program. A correctly implemented maintenance schedule should yield several benefits, including:
- More reliable, efficient, and optimally performing equipment
- A longer lifespan for your organization’s physical assets
- Streamlined parts inventory management
- A reduction in equipment malfunction, failure, and repair costs
- Minimization of unplanned downtime and a consequent maximization of productivity
- Stronger adherence to safety standards and compliance with regulatory requirements
Key components of an effective maintenance schedule
An effective maintenance schedule will typically include the following components:
- Clear, detailed, and actionable task descriptions for each piece of equipment
- Distribution of tasks based on predetermined intervals (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, annual, etc.)
- Delegation of tasks and roles to maintenance team members
- Clear workflows for executing tasks including details on responsible personnel and necessary parts
- Continuous monitoring, adjustment, and optimization
Creating a maintenance schedule
Your preventive maintenance schedule will be built around the demands presented by your physical assets. Each piece of equipment you use to run your business carries its own set of servicing needs, manufacturer guidelines, and safety requirements. As you create your maintenance schedule, you will need to take these factors into consideration.
The steps outlined below offer a basic guide for creating a maintenance schedule while incorporating these critical factors.
Step 1: Inventory and prioritize assets
Document every physical asset that requires routine maintenance and prioritize tasks based on the criticality and vulnerability of these assets.
Step 2: Gather information on your assets
Consult user manuals, incorporate manufacturer guidelines, review historical maintenance data, and monitor current asset performance indicators in order to determine optimal maintenance intervals.
Step 3: Define maintenance tasks for each asset
Specify the tasks to be performed on each asset (i.e. inspections, cleaning, calibration, lubrication, parts replacement, etc.), and develop detailed maintenance procedures for each task.
Step 4: Allocate physical and human resources
Assign maintenance tasks and responsibilities to specific team members, and identify required resources, including tools, spare parts, and raw materials
Step 5: Leverage PM scheduling software
Implement your maintenance schedule using a CMMS in order to track maintenance activities, integrate advanced data analytics, and provide centralized access for all relevant team members.
What is preventive maintenance scheduling software?
Preventive maintenance (PM) scheduling software is a digital tool designed to streamline the planning, tracking, and management of planned maintenance activities. Preventive maintenance activities should be informed by meaningful data, closely coordinated with inventory management, and based on the variable needs of your physical assets. In other words, scheduling these activities may be complicated.
Preventive maintenance scheduling software can help facilitate implementation, simplify the process of ongoing management, and provide insights for continuous improvement. While there are various PM scheduling software solutions available, including the features built into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are often preferred for their ease of implementation and their comprehensive list of features.
CMMS preventive maintenance scheduling features
Below, we take a closer look at some of the features that make the CMMS a preferred solution for preventive maintenance scheduling.
- Preventive maintenance planning functionality, including a maintenance calendar dashboard, the ability to establish repeat intervals, and user-friendly schedule adjustment
- Asset management tools for tracking the lifecycle of assets and compiling critical details like model, serial number, location, warranty status, vendor contact information, and maintenance history
- Work order management, allowing users to create, assign, track, and complete work orders, while also prioritizing tasks based on criticality
- Inventory management tools for tracking the location of parts, monitoring inventory levels in real time, and automating the reordering processes
- Mobile accessibility, allowing maintenance personnel to access and update maintenance data and work orders in real-time from anywhere
- Reporting and analytics on maintenance activities, equipment reliability, and other key performance indicators.
Benefits of PM maintenance scheduling software
Implementing a preventive maintenance schedule is an inherently challenging process, particularly for organizations that are transitioning away from exclusively reactive maintenance strategies. Your organization may face challenges:
- Incorporating historical maintenance data into a preventive maintenance framework
- Gaining buy-in from maintenance personnel
- Budgeting for the upfront costs that come with more frequent maintenance activities
The right PM maintenance scheduling software can help your organization weather these challenges. Indeed, leveraging the PM maintenance scheduling software included with your CMMS platform can carry considerable benefits, helping your organization streamline maintenance activities, improve asset reliability, and achieve greater overall operational efficiency.
Below, we take a closer look at some of these benefits, and discuss how a robust preventive maintenance scheduling software solution can help your organization overcome the common challenges to effective preventive maintenance.
- Centralized management: A user-friendly dashboard gives your team access to maintenance-related data and information—including work orders, schedules, asset information, and maintenance histories–all in one place.
- Increased equipment reliability: Regular maintenance activities keep equipment in optimal working condition, reducing the likelihood of unexpected breakdowns, unplanned downtime, and premature failure.
- Predictive maintenance: Advanced CMMS tools can be integrated with condition monitoring sensors and IoT devices in order to provide real-time performance indicators, facilitate condition-based maintenance, and optimize the planning of preventive maintenance tasks.
- Reduced maintenance costs: Proactive maintenance models are proven to reduce the high costs associated with emergency repairs, expedited inventory delivery, and unplanned downtime.
- Improved regulatory compliance: Regular maintenance reduces the risk of accidents; routine inspections improve adherence to regulatory requirements; and documentation of activities reduces the risk of fines or penalties for noncompliance.
- Data-driven decision making: CMMS platforms provide real-time performance indicators, advanced analytics, and detailed reporting to help your organization make data-driven maintenance and scheduling decisions.
These benefits underscore the value of a well-selected CMMS solution. The right scheduling software will do more than simply streamline your maintenance program. Your PM scheduling software should support your broader operational goals and strategic objectives to help make maintenance a valued strategic ally.
To learn more about how a CMMS can streamline your maintenance strategy, improve the lifespan of your physical assets, and drive your operation to greater productivity, check out Limble’s leading edge preventive maintenance software.
