How To Schedule Equipment Preventive Maintenance

Key Takeaways – Scheduling Preventive Maintenance (PMs)

• You can schedule preventive maintenance on equipment (& even facilities!) by day of the week, day of the month, meter reading changes, conditions/ alarms, completion of other work and so on.
• The best way to do this effectively is with maintenance management software as explained below.
• An Equipment Maintenance Calendar report is essential if you have a lot of equipment.
• Unplanned maintenance, operational issues, missing spare parts and more can throw a spanner into the best laid plans.

Preventive Maintenance Scheduling Options

For instance, FastMaint CMMS offers these common preventive maintenance scheduling options. Taken in different combinations they provide a rich subset of ways to plan scheduled maintenance for equipment & machinery over the coming weeks, months and years.

1. Schedule by dates:

This is the most common way to schedule preventive maintenance. You can set how often the work should be done. For example some of our industrial manufacturing customers need to plan PMs for a packing machine – like inspect a machine bearing for failure every Wednesday, change an oil filter every 45 days, or disassemble and lubricate a gear housing every 6 months.

2. Schedule by equipment use/ meter readings:

We schedule preventive maintenance based on how much the machine is used. For example, a truck at a warehouse needs an oil change every 3,000 miles. Or at a manufacturing plant, an injection molding machine will need lubrication and a hydraulic oil filter change after processing 10,000 items.

3. Schedule based on completion of other work:

This means a maintenance task is scheduled a certain number of days after another task is completed. It’s useful when work orders need to be linked. For example, if a job involves two tasks handled by different subcontractors like say a loading dock repair which may first involve concrete repairs by a subcontractor after which a second subcontractor will repair the dock leveler.

4. Schedule on an alarm condition:

This lets us set an external condition—like an alarm—that triggers preventive maintenance. For example, if a machine overheats, it may mean all bearings need lubrication. It can also include alarms or maintenance requests triggered by condition monitoring or predictive maintenance systems, which may be separate from the main maintenance software.

What scheduling options to choose & setup steps

For more details as well as upsides & downsides of these scheduling options see “How To Schedule Preventive Maintenance Work Orders“.

Another hurdle especially if you are trying to setup preventive maintenance for the first time is what to deal with first. Some useful tips & setup steps are provided in the FastMaint support guide “How to manage preventive maintenance“.

Making Your Equipment Maintenance Plan Work

This is where reports from your CMMS software (maintenance management software) can be quite useful. Look for a report like Equipment Maintenance Calendar or Maintenance Calendar. This report should give you an idea of preventative maintenance due in the coming months week by week.

This is important since you can make changes in scheduling options in your maintenance software to try and get maintenance work for different equipment scheduled at the best time. For instance, get most maintenance scheduled during a plant shutdown period, avoid scheduling during peak production periods and so on.

Equipment Preventive Maintenance Scheduling Tips

1. Plan for unplanned maintenance!

Equipment breakdowns or other issues will need unplanned or corrective maintenance. This means that maintenance staff with required skills must be available even during weeks that not much maintenance is being planned. Having a look at prior year breakdown work orders can give you an idea of the possible work load. But remember that it probably is not accurate since equipment breakdown is quite unpredictable!

2. Maintenance calendars adjustments

You will plan to retire some equipment later during the year. Or you will install new equipment. This will impact the maintenance calendar. You can drop some maintenance tasks after some date while new maintenance tasks may need to be done after other dates.

3. Watch out for work overload

Check carefully and make sure that planned workloads are not unreasonable and you have the staff to do them. If you are overloaded in some weeks change your maintenance task schedules. A work overload will also impact your ability to handle equipment breakdowns during those weeks.

4. Review plans with other departments

Discuss with operations staff if it is acceptable to remove some equipment from service at certain times. For example at a manufacturing plant you would discuss these plans with production management. At a hotel or resort facility you will want to discuss with management for housekeeping, front desk, sales and so on.

You may find it is a busy period and the worst time to do any planned maintenance! Change settings on maintenance task schedules to ensure that planned maintenance dates are adjusted to accommodate such needs.

5. Check demand for spare parts and maintenance supplies

It is also be a good time to get an idea of expected maintenance spare parts demands over the coming months. This will help you order items early from suppliers. In addition having an idea of quantities needed may allow you to get quantity discounts.

For example in FastMaint CMMS, the work order reports have an option to calculate parts usage and availability for future periods. This is useful to get an idea of spare parts & supplies needed and when you will need them.

See “6 Ways CMMS/ Maintenance Software Can Improve Vendor Management” and “3 Ways To Improve Maintenance Spare Parts Management” for some additional spare parts management tips.

Also see at “7 Tips To Plan Equipment Preventive Maintenance” for how to setup your equipment and plan maintenance.

Looking for A Way To Create A Maintenance Calendar?

Get a 30-day trial of FastMaint CMMS. See why it is a good maintenance scheduling software program! Use the import feature to load in your equipment and maintenance tasks. Setup the preventive maintenance plan. You can then use the Maintenance Calendar Report in FastMaint to get an idea of the preventive maintenance due in the coming months.