The Optimum Preventive Maintenance Schedule: 7 Steps for Efficient and Effective Preventive Maintenance Planning and Scheduling

If you’re in charge of operating a business and ensuring all maintenance tasks are carried out, it can quickly become overwhelming. 

How do you ensure preventive maintenance tasks are planned, a maintenance worker is assigned to complete the task, and the task is either done or scheduled to recur at a specified interval? 

With all of the assets in a facility, preventive maintenance tasks can easily be overlooked. 

Creating an effective preventive maintenance schedule could be the tool you need for scheduling success. Learn seven steps for efficient planning and scheduling and some common challenges that might arise.

What Is a Preventive Maintenance Schedule?

A preventive maintenance (PM) schedule is a maintenance plan designed to execute preventive maintenance work. It relies on organization and planned timelines to ensure routine maintenance tasks are carried out based on a specific time or usage trigger. 

In maintenance scheduling, the scheduler determines who will perform the work and coordinates materials, equipment, and an overall timeframe for the job. This kind of schedule doesn’t just target specific dates — it allows work to be scheduled and performed at repeated intervals, like in a preventive maintenance program. 

UpKeep’s CMMS provides a comprehensive solution to ordinary preventive maintenance planning and scheduling. Why spend time manually submitting work orders and setting reminders for your preventive maintenance schedules when you could have a system do the work for you? UpKeep:

• Automates work orders
• Provides a platform for communicating with technicians
• Allows you to customize your preventive maintenance schedule dashboard
• Use KPIs and IoT sensors to trigger work orders and PM tasks
• And more 

Types of Preventive Maintenance Schedules

Effective preventive maintenance schedules help facility managers efficiently allocate maintenance resources, maintain assets, and plan for the future. But preventive maintenance schedules aren’t one-size-fits-all. 

Instead, you have options when it comes to choosing the type of preventive maintenance schedule that works best for your facility. 

Although there are more, many PM schedules fall under these two categories:

Fixed Preventive Maintenance Schedule

A fixed preventive maintenance schedule is a routine maintenance plan that is scheduled according to specific usage intervals. Fixed maintenance tasks will happen whether previous tasks were completed or not. 

For example, any preventive maintenance task scheduled for every Monday will happen every Monday whether a task that should’ve also been completed last week was done or not. 

Fixed preventive maintenance tasks can also be triggered by usage intervals. For example, if vehicles in your fleet get serviced every 5,000 miles, a work order will be created every 5,000 miles regardless of how long it takes the vehicle to reach that mileage. 

Floating Preventive Maintenance Schedule

The opposite of fixed preventive maintenance tasks is floating preventive maintenance tasks. These are scheduled based on the timing of previous preventive maintenance tasks — past usage or maintenance history. One work order won’t be triggered until the prior work order has been submitted and closed. 

For example, HVAC system maintenance happens every 100 hours of operation. However, it was delayed until 120 hours of operation before the work order was fulfilled and closed. The next work order will not be triggered until after 220 hours of usage — 100 hours from the closing of the previous work order. 

If instead, the HVAC system was on a fixed preventive maintenance schedule, the next work order would be triggered for 200 hours of usage regardless of when the previous work order was closed. 

Who Conducts Preventive Maintenance Scheduling?  

Typically, maintenance schedules are completed by:

• Dedicated maintenance schedulers
• Maintenance supervisors
• Maintenance planners

Dedicated schedulers are often necessary for large operations with complex maintenance needs. In smaller operations, individual supervisors or maintenance planners might perform the scheduling.

Regardless of who is in charge of preventive maintenance scheduling, teams should consider multiple factors when scheduling maintenance work. By following the steps below, maintenance teams can better ensure nothing is overlooked:

1. Read the work order and clarify details with the maintenance planner. 
2. Secure necessary resources (tools, people, supplies, parts, equipment, etc.)
3. Make sure the asset is available and ready for maintenance. 
4. Assign the task to a technician. 
5. Follow up and make improvements as necessary.

For preventive maintenance tasks that are scheduled on a recurring basis, the schedule must ensure that each work order is completed on time, every time.

7 Steps for Creating a Preventive Maintenance Schedule

#1: Identify Assets That Require a PM Schedule

The first step in establishing a holistic preventive maintenance schedule is inventorying all of your assets that require routine preventive maintenance. How can you do this? Ask questions like:

• How critical is the asset to daily operations?
• Does it have failure modes that may be prevented with routine maintenance and inspections?
• Are the failure rates of the asset associated with age or usage?

If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, log the asset and include its:

• Make
• Model
• Serial number
• Location
• Spare parts
• Previous maintenance history

UpKeep allows you to log every detail of every asset in one centralized place. Instead of storing information separately, you can add critical asset details, maintenance history, and other valuable documents all in one work order. 

#2: Prioritize Assets by Maintenance Needs

Creating preventive maintenance schedules for dozens to hundreds of assets can be time-consuming. Setting service schedules for every relevant piece of equipment can take months, but prioritizing your most essential assets can help. 

Use a systematic approach to prioritize assets by calculating each asset’s risk priority number (RPN). Find this out by using this equation:

Severity x Occurrence x Detection = Risk Priority Number

Each variable can be ranked from one to ten and categorized as follows:

• Severity: Indicates how severe the failure would be to your operations. 
• Occurrence: Indicates the likelihood of an asset failing.
• Detection: Indicates the likelihood of detecting if an asset will fail.

For example, an asset with a severity of eight (8), an occurrence of five (5), and a detection of ten (10) would have a risk priority number of 400. 

After calculating the RPN for each asset, you can rank them from the highest RPN to the lowest to find which assets are most critical and should be prioritized. 

#3: Identify a Schedule Based on Maintenance Triggers

After you’ve chosen the assets to include in your preventive maintenance schedule and have prioritized them, you must decide how to schedule the maintenance tasks. 

Some assets might work better on a floating schedule, whereas others may work better on a time-based schedule. 

A significant risk associated with preventive maintenance is wasting valuable resources and time by over-inspecting and over-maintaining assets. 

Setting preventive maintenance intervals based on priority and needs can eliminate this issue. You might need to modify intervals based on what works and what doesn’t. Using a CMMS to gain insight into the effectiveness of your preventive maintenance schedule can help. 

UpKeep allows users to track KPIs and maintenance trends with our intuitive and customizable maintenance dashboard.

#4: Prioritize Maintenance Tasks

Let’s face it — the capacity of your maintenance team likely does not match the amount of maintenance work that needs to be accomplished every day. Learning to scale your day-to-day work in accordance with your team’s capacity is important. 

Even though preventive maintenance is proactive by nature, some regular maintenance tasks still rank as a higher priority than others. By noting the priority level of each maintenance task on your daily schedule, your team can make informed decisions on which tasks to tend to immediately and which to defer to later. 

Here are some things to consider when identifying a task's priority:

• Criticality of the asset
• Safety risks associated with deferring the tasks
• Risks of operational disruptions if the task is deferred
• Time and resources needed to complete the task

#5: Schedule Recurring Tasks

Once you’ve made the preventive maintenance task in your CMMS, a work order will be created for each instance. 

Most CMMS platforms allow users to create recurring work orders using checklists that automatically include the relevant procedural documentation for maintenance personnel. 

Although many CMMS automate work orders, UpKeep is one of the few that allow you to set recurring work orders when IoT sensors hit a specific threshold.

#6: Document Work Using Preventive Maintenance Checklists

After your work order has been completed successfully, the technician assigned to it will close out the work order, signaling that the preventive maintenance task should recur at its specified interval or from the moment the work is completed. 

The work order will be generated automatically upon the next interval being reached, forming a preventive maintenance schedule per asset, area, or facility. 

UpKeep allows technicians and maintenance managers to log notes in work orders and tag previous work orders into the asset’s profile. By centralizing the maintenance history and asset logs of each item, technicians can quickly view previous trends to resolve issues and decrease downtime.

#7: Monitor the Effectiveness and Make Improvements as Needed

Even after you’ve mastered preventive maintenance planning and scheduling, it’s crucial to track your progress to maintain effectiveness. You can do this by checking to see if each asset receives maintenance as scheduled. 

You can also look at the failure frequency before and after implementing a preventive maintenance schedule. If you’re still experiencing frequent failures, you may want to adjust the type and frequency of preventive maintenance tasks. You might also discover that you’re overperforming preventive maintenance tasks and should scale back on the frequency to avoid waste. 

Continue monitoring these three important metrics:

• Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF): MTBF shows the average time between asset breakdowns. This number should increase with an effective preventive maintenance schedule. 
• Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percentage (SMCP): This metric indicates whether a preventive maintenance task is late and by how much. By tracking the tardiness of preventive maintenance activities, you can better understand whether or not you have enough resources allocated to a task and how to help identify these deficiencies. 
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE): OEE tracks how effective your equipment is during operations. This metric tracks efficiency by monitoring the availability, performance, and quality of an asset.

Be Aware of These Common Preventive Maintenance Schedule Challenges

While preventive maintenance scheduling seems fairly straightforward, it’s often riddled with challenges that can disrupt workflows and decrease schedule compliance:

• Lack of communication between operation crews
• Inefficient MRO inventory management
• Challenges with suppliers
• Lack of proper in-house training for specialized tasks
• Misunderstandings with contractors

These challenges often stem from the difficulty of working with multiple parties at once. Because of this, schedulers need strong communication skills — and, in some cases, a will of iron — to ensure that preventive maintenance tasks happen on time.

Optimize Your Preventive Maintenance Planning and Scheduling With UpKeep’s Innovative CMMS Software

Your preventive maintenance schedule might require some fine-tuning before it’s perfected. A comprehensive preventive maintenance tool can help. 

UpKeep strives to help businesses and production facilities enhance their preventive maintenance planning and scheduling. Our software is the key to unlocking the potential of your PM efficiency. With our CMMS, you can complete tasks that support your preventive maintenance activities, such as:

• Easily scheduling asset and equipment maintenance
• Monitoring asset performance and maintenance efficiency
• Gaining insight into maintenance costs
• Repeating work orders based on time or usage

With the power of UpKeep, you can keep up with every aspect of your preventive maintenance schedule. Start your free demo today.