CMMS Software Tip: Why You Need An Equipment Maintenance Calendar

Complex planning required!

With several different types of equipment it can be hard to figure out the best times to schedule preventative maintenance. Some maintenance may take several days to complete causing issues with operations/ production who need the equipment to be available and functioning. Several periods during the year can be bad because they are peak production times, seasonally busy or busy due to planned customer deliveries. Besides this even if the equipment may be idle after hours because it is not used throughout the day, you need to make sure it is back up and functioning at the start of a new day. All this can result in the need for some fairly complex planning!

How an equipment maintenance calendar can help

A good way to manage all this complexity is by putting together an equipment maintenance calendar which shows you which equipment is scheduled for preventive maintenance and when it is scheduled. This also allows you to schedule multiple preventive maintenance tasks on a machine at the same time or close together so that all can be accomplished with minimum disruption at idle times. In many seasonal operations or manufacturing plants there are shutdown times that may last for a few days during the holidays or can be a few months (e.g. for an amusement park operation). This is usually a very good time to plan such preventative maintenance activities.

Create the calendar with your CMMS software

Making such a calendar can be made a lot easier using features of your CMMS/ maintenance software. You should be able to define calendars with working hours, off days and seasonal off periods. These calendars can be associated with equipment or maintenance tasks. The software can use such information to help you put together a calendar of preventative maintenance work over several months into the future. You can use these calendars to discuss with operations/ production to see if any work needs to be rescheduled or changed to better suit their needs. You can then go back to the CMMS/ maintenance software and make adjustments to the preventative maintenance task schedules to do schedule adjustments that can accommodate such operational needs.

Don’t have maintenance management software?

If you do not have maintenance software that you can use to create such a calendar you can download and try out a fully functional 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS for maintenance management.

Useful resources

1. “Use Equipment Criticality to Match Planned Maintenance Strategy to the Operational Risks” by Mike Sondalini of Lifetime Reliability Solutions.
2. “Plant Maintenance Shutdown” from Industrial Maintenance & Plant Operations (IMPO) magazine.