Preventive Maintenance Planning – How To Check Plan Health

Preventive maintenance planning has a purpose!

Are you using maintenance management software for your preventive maintenance planning? Most maintenance programs aka CMMS software have many reports for different purposes. They often look very good and sometimes they can be really useful! 😉

On the other hand…

Do you know the health of your preventive maintenance plan?

It can be confusing which reports to use to measure how well one is doing compared to the maintenance plan. After planning preventive maintenance for our facilities and equipment, it is important to make sure that the actual preventive maintenance being done is as close to what we planned.

What does it mean if the actual preventive maintenance done differs a lot from the maintenance plan?

The plan may have design issues or there may be big problems in implementation. We will not meet our targeted goals. Good preventive maintenance planning should help one reduce unplanned maintenance and equipment downtime. This will result in lower costs, higher customer satisfaction & less maintenance personnel burnout.

How to check the health of the preventive maintenance plan

Different maintenance programs have different reports. In FastMaint CMMS the Work Order Analysis Report is very useful to check plan health.  The main idea is to check the the average days to complete work orders over different periods.

What is the average days to complete work orders?

It represents the average of the difference between work order Completed date & original Planned date for each work order. So if a work order is planned for 1st July 2022 and is completed on 3rd July 2022, the days to complete would be 3 days.

There are two specific items you are looking out for:

1. Consistently high values for the average days to complete work orders

Check the maintenance plan! There could be many causes such as:

a) Many tasks may actually take more time than estimated: See “5 Tips To Improve Maintenance Work Order Estimates” to help reduce this.

b) There are scheduling conflicts: For instance maintenance tasks scheduled at the same time or maintenance technicians are on not available and so on. Use the Availability Checking feature in the work order Planning report before sending out work orders to identify such issues. You can make changes in work orders and schedules prior to sending them out.

c) Spare parts & supplies not available: Again the Availability Checking feature in the work order Planning report can find such issues in advance. In addition the system can show you parts and supplies that need to be reordered.

2. Highly varying average days to complete work orders

This signals a possibly unbalanced maintenance plan.

a) Firstly there could be many big tasks scheduled at the same time in some periods of the year but not in other periods. Checking prior periods in the analysis report should show this happen regularly.

b) Secondly some maintenance technicians do not have the skills to complete the maintenance work. An indication can be different technicians doing similar work orders take different times.

c) Thirdly spare parts shortages may be delaying work. Review work order feedback and check for these issues.

As an illustration looking at the Work Order Analysis Report shown below. We should check what happened to planned work orders during the month of April.

Work order analysis report (from FastMaint CMMS)

Based on investigations we want to take different actions as explained before.  In addition, “How To Schedule Preventive Maintenance With A Maintenance Calendar” has useful tips to reduce schedule conflicts. Also see “Four Easy Ways To Setup An Equipment Maintenance Schedule” for better preventive maintenance planning techniques.

Need CMMS software for your preventive maintenance planning?

There are hundreds of maintenance software programs available. Each one is best suited for specific uses and organization types. Shortlisting the programs that will suit you can be a challenge!

This free CMMS Software Selection Guide will be very helpful. Use the suggestions and selection checklists to identify the right CMMS program for your maintenance team.

Free CMMS Software Selection Guide