How to Create an Effective Preventive Maintenance Schedule

Preventive maintenance is a proactive approach to maintenance management. Once you have a preventive maintenance strategy, it’s time to create your preventive maintenance schedule (PM schedule).

Creating a PM schedule is a balancing act across various factors like asset priorities, maintenance needs and resource constraints. The idea is to oil the machine, lubricate the conveyor belt or monitor equipment through vibrations without waiting for a problem to occur. The problem? Decentralized processes and disparate systems make it a little too difficult to execute a preventive maintenance schedule effectively.

Let’s talk about how you can create a preventive maintenance plan with frictionless processes and a centralized information database that helps you monitor your maintenance schedule.

Things to Consider Before Creating Your Preventive Maintenance Schedule

Here’s what you should know before you start preparing your PM schedule:

• Preventive maintenance program: You can’t execute your schedule without your preventive maintenance program (PM program). You need to build your maintenance work schedule on the back of your program. Use your program to distinguish whether your asset maintenance is considered routine maintenance or preventive.
• Manufacturer’s recommendations: Think of the equipment manufacturer’s recommendations as a culmination of extensive research, testing and real-world experience condensed into a set of instructions. Use the manufacturer’s recommendations to determine things like servicing frequency, maintenance tasks to perform on any given piece of equipment and the quantity of spare parts to keep in inventory.
• Time-based versus usage or meter-based preventive maintenance: Assets may require time-based or usage-based preventive maintenance based on factors like operational environment, criticality to operations and availability of monitoring systems. For example, assets subjected to heavy loads or harsh environments may require usage-based maintenance activities based on actual wear and usage patterns.
• Asset lifecycle: Assets require varying levels of maintenance at different stages of their lifecycle. They require more frequent inspections and upkeep during the early part of their lifecycle and more intensive maintenance (or replacement planning) toward the end of their lifecycle.
• Criticality to operations: Prioritize mission-critical assets when developing your PM schedule to minimize downtime. Conversely, you may choose a more flexible approach when preparing a maintenance process for non-critical assets.
• Team capability: Consider your team member’s capabilities and set realistic schedules. Overcommitting to maintenance tasks beyond your team’s capacity translates to burnout and inefficient execution. Align your maintenance schedule with your team’s skills and capacity to optimize efforts while uplifting morale and productivity.
• Historical data: Maintenance history helps identify patterns in maintenance, asset performance, and equipment failures. Insights from this data help you identify causes for recurring issues, allowing you to fine-tune your preventive maintenance schedule to maximize asset reliability and cost-effectiveness.

How to Create a Preventive Maintenance Schedule

Preventive maintenance is expensive — manufacturers spend anywhere between 15 and 70 percent of the cost of produced goods on maintenance. It’s important to create a streamlined schedule that makes the best use of your resources to keep costs to a minimum.

Here’s a simple, seven-step process that will help you create your preventive maintenance schedule and put a large portion of it on autopilot using a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software like Coast.

Establish High-Priority Assets

Start with a criticality analysis of your assets. Criticality analysis is a system process used in asset management to evaluate an asset’s priority rank in your overall asset portfolio. An asset’s rank is the weighted average of its ratings across multiple factors like functional importance, impact of failure, dependency and operational risk.

Assess Each Asset’s Maintenance Needs

An asset’s maintenance needs depend on factors like the asset’s age, usage patterns and environmental conditions. Consider these factors when preparing a work order template for that asset. For example, the work order to “lubricate the conveyor belt” should be scheduled at a higher frequency if the conveyor belt is old or is often overloaded.

Establish Preventive Maintenance Tasks

Create a list of preventive maintenance tasks for each asset. For example, if you’re creating a weekly maintenance task list for a CNC milling machine, add things like lubricating spindle bearings, cleaning the spindle taper and tool holder interface, and calibrating tool offsets and tool lengths to the list.

Use maintenance software like Coast to create a task checklist — using old-school methods like paper or spreadsheets don’t allow you to track work orders in real time. A CMMS allows maintenance technicians to check off tasks using their mobile phones the moment they complete them. It also has a built-in chat option that allows workers to contact the supervisor the second they need help.

Set Maintenance Intervals

Recurring work orders require a frequency. Use the manufacturer’s recommendations and historical data to determine how frequently an asset requires maintenance. Coast lets you configure the frequency when you’re creating a workflow. Once it’s set up, you’ll see a notification whenever the work order is due next. You can even set a specific time you want to be notified.

Assign Responsibilities

Practice makes perfect. Assign the same person to perform maintenance on a specific group of assets. Over time, you’ll see them become more efficient at performing those tasks. When assigning tasks, be sure to spread those tasks out well across your team — you don’t want to overwhelm one technician with work when there’s a technician sitting with no maintenance tasks due. Coast allows you to add one or more technicians to a work order when you’re creating one:

Use Maintenance Software

At this point, you have a preventive maintenance schedule ready to execute. But how exactly do you control this schedule, monitor the work orders or communicate with technicians on specific tasks? That’s where software comes in. Maintenance software helps:

• Schedule and streamline work orders: You can schedule work orders and assign them with just a few taps on your phone. Once you create a work order, you and your team can view its status and the maintenance tasks in that work order at all times.
• Track progress: See the progress of a work order and view how long the repair takes. Use this information to schedule future maintenance requests.
• Prioritize and reschedule: Prioritize requests by their urgency level and reschedule work orders based on maintenance needs and if any emergencies pop up.
• Remind and notify technicians: It’s easy to forget a work order when you’re dealing with a dozen a week. Preventive maintenance software notifies employees about work orders as within a specific timeframe close to the due date, so things never fall through the cracks.
• Communicate: Maintenance software with built-in chat features allows you to address a technician’s queries in real time. For instance, Coast allows technicians to leave comments and add pictures to work orders for additional context.
• Get an overview of the maintenance schedule: Maintenance software centralizes data that helps you visualize your preventive maintenance schedule. Software with built-in analytics features allows you to understand maintenance performance and identify room for improvement through interactive charts and insightful metrics.

Monitor and Adjust the Schedule

Monitor your preventive maintenance schedule through preventive maintenance software. Look for inefficiencies in the maintenance workflow and see if you’re performing maintenance on specific assets too frequently or less frequently. Can’t seem to find anything you can improve? Ask your team. Use these insights to adjust and optimize your preventive maintenance schedule.

Why Maintenance Teams Need a Preventive Maintenance Schedule

Preventive maintenance requires an upfront investment of time and money, so it’s natural to be curious about the value it offers. Here’s why your team needs preventive maintenance:

• Minimizes downtime or disruptions: Downtime is expensive. In fact, Siemens estimates that the cost of unplanned downtime could be as high as $129 million per year per plant for a Fortune Global 500 firm. Preventive maintenance can save your business thousands of dollars a year and help achieve production efficiency.
• Extends asset lifespan: Regular upkeep keeps assets in top condition and helps identify and address issues early on. This makes preventive maintenance a powerful tool to extend your asset’s useful life.
• Safety and compliance: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires manufacturers to maintain adequate safety through regular maintenance. For example, preventive maintenance ensures that safety equipment like emergency eyewash stations and fire extinguishers are in working condition. Maintenance software can also store records of injuries or illnesses that occur at your worksite — OSHA requires companies with more than 10 employees to maintain these records for at least five years. Non-compliance can result in a minimum $5,000 penalty.

• Cost savings: Preventive maintenance results in cost savings because it prevents equipment failures, extends asset lifespans, optimizes energy efficiency, preserves product quality and improves operational efficiency.

Tips for Implementing a Successful Preventive Maintenance Schedule

The most common problems with implementing a preventive maintenance schedule are backlogs, communication delays and confusion regarding work orders. Here are some things to keep in mind to successfully implement an effective preventive maintenance schedule:

Commit to Your Schedule

Stick to your maintenance schedule. If you see backlogs piling up, focus on clearing them as soon as you can. Once you’ve cleared your backlog, use it as a learning opportunity. The best way to prevent backlogs is to use reliable maintenance software that tracks overdue tasks. This allows you to regularly follow up on them and ensure they’re completed before more backlogs pile up.

Inform Your Maintenance Staff

Maintenance software notifies technicians when a work order is due. This ensures they don’t miss out on any work orders even when they have a full plate. Built-in chat also goes a long way in communicating with your maintenance team — you can follow up on work orders, let technicians know about urgent work orders or answer technicians’ questions to minimize delays.

Use Preventive Maintenance Checklists

Checklists make it easier and quicker for technicians to complete work orders. Instead of having to rely on experience, they can simply go through the list and check off tasks as they complete them.

Coast allows you to create a to-do list when creating a work order. However, if the maintenance tasks require additional context, you can create a procedure that includes the step-by-step process along with file attachments (documents or pictures) and notes.

Create Maintenance Reports

Reports are crucial because they help you assess your current preventive maintenance schedule’s performance. Tracking KPIs like Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) score tells you if your maintenance strategy is yielding the results you expect.

Reports also help you understand maintenance costs, monitor compliance and make decisions related to resource allocation and spare parts inventory levels.

Create Your Preventive Maintenance Schedule With Coast

A preventive maintenance schedule is your silver bullet to improved operational efficiency, greater equipment lifespan and minimizing maintenance costs. The problem? Implementing preventive maintenance can be challenging, especially without software.

You need a tool specially designed for maintenance professionals, where you can track work orders, communicate with technicians and generate insightful reports to paint a comprehensive picture of your maintenance efforts.

Preventive maintenance software like Coast enables you to implement your schedule successfully with minimal breakdowns and disruptions to your business operations.