Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP) Explained

What is planned maintenance percentage?

Planned maintenance percentage (PMP) is a percentage that describes the amount of maintenance time used towards planned maintenance tasks, which is measured against the total amount of maintenance hours in a given time period (weeks, months, years).

World Class Standards For Planned Maintenance Percentage

Aim to have a planned maintenance percentage of >85%.

Overview

The PMP metric exists because it’s useful for organizations to track how their maintenance time is spent. While a planned maintenance percentage shows an organization how much time is spent performing planned maintenance, it also shows how much time is spent fixing reactive/corrective issues and unplanned downtime events.

Calculating a facility’s PMP is a useful way of determining what issues need to be combated. For example, if the PMP is low (which means a small amount of maintenance hours is being spent on planned maintenance), there could be a problem with production equipment that’s keeping it from functioning at an appropriate level. In this way, PMP is not only a measurement tool for planned maintenance efficiency but also a diagnostic tool.

Any organization interested in creating a more effective maintenance culture will find a planned maintenance percentage useful. As a starting figure, a world class PMP is about 85% or above, meaning that 85% of the facility’s maintenance hours are dedicated to planned maintenance tasks.

How to calculate planned maintenance percentage

You can calculate PMP with the following equation:

(Planned maintenance hours / Total maintenance hours) * 100

For example, let’s say the maintenance team of an automotive factory performs 500 hours of maintenance in a month. Of those 500 hours, 400 of them are planned maintenance hours. This makes our equation:

(400 planned maintenance hours / 500 total maintenance hours) * 100 = 80% PMP

Remember that calculating a facility’s PMP requires solid documentation of maintenance hours. Any organization looking to improve their PMP needs to also make sure that these hours are being rigorously documented so that the percentage is as accurate as possible. Maintenance software can help you with this.

How to improve planned maintenance percentage with schedule compliance

For an organization to improve its planned maintenance percentage a larger proportion of their maintenance hours needs to be spent performing planned maintenance. An important factor, then, is schedule compliance, which measure how often scheduled maintenance tasks are completed on time.

You can improve schedule compliance by:

• Planning tasks with employee skill level in mind. (Scheduling a new maintenance technician to the most difficult tasks can increase the time it takes for repairs.)
• Ensuring proper documentation of all necessary procedures, especially in emergency and critically important cases
• Scheduling work appropriately. (Low work productivity can be the result of too few or too many tasks per employee.)
• Determining causal elements for why work is not being completed on time or at all (i,e. fix the base cause)
• Working with operations and maintenance supervisors to improve plans and schedules based on feedback

Schedule compliance is a tricky figure because there’s no one right answer for improvement. In fact, often the reasons for low schedule compliance look like a web of interrelated factors, all influencing each other and causing mutual issues amongst themselves. That’s why communicating with employees, supervisors, and managers is so important.

For example, if maintenance technicians feel like they have too many tasks with not enough time, but their supervisor continues to schedule maintenance hours without asking them, schedule compliance drops because a disconnect exists between the needs of the maintenance team and their supervisor.

From the outside, it may look like the technicians are to blame, but the issue has more facets than just “lazy employees” or “unaware supervisors.”

Benefits of improving planned maintenance percentage

There are numerous benefits to improving a facility’s planned maintenance percentage, even stretching beyond simple metrics into the entire culture of the maintenance team. Some of these benefits include:

• Reduced amount of unplanned downtime due to equipment running at optimal health
• Lower maintenance costs (overtime pay, spares, replacement parts)
• Alleviated stress on maintenance team to constantly react to emergency situations
• Greater control of facility budget due to planned costs as opposed to reactive costs