Preventive maintenance schedules teams actually follow
Most PM programmes fail on realism, not on intent. Build one that survives a bad month.
A preventive maintenance schedule that nobody completes is worse than none at all, because it manufactures a backlog that teaches everyone to ignore the system. The failure is almost never laziness. It is arithmetic.
Start from available hours, not from the manual
Add up the PM hours your schedule demands per month, then compare that with the technician hours you actually have after reactive work. If the first number exceeds the second, the schedule is fiction and the team knows it before you do.
Tier by consequence
- Critical: assets whose failure stops production or breaches a statutory duty. Schedule these first and protect them.
- Important: failure is expensive but absorbable. Schedule on interval, allow a tolerance window.
- Routine: failure is an inconvenience. Batch these into site visits rather than scheduling individually.
Tiering makes the inevitable shortfall a decision rather than an accident. When a bad month comes, the routine tier slips and the critical tier does not.
Use meter-based intervals where you have meters
Calendar intervals over-service idle assets and under-service hard-working ones. Where runtime hours or output counts are available, schedule against them. The same PM effort delivers noticeably more reliability.
Make completion a two-minute task
If closing a PM requires returning to a desk, PMs will be closed in batches on Friday from memory. A phone that takes a checklist result and a photograph on the spot is the difference between a record and a reconstruction.
Review the ones you keep skipping
A PM that has been deferred four times in a row is telling you it is not needed at that interval, or not needed at all. Deleting it is a legitimate outcome of review, and it buys credibility for the schedule that remains.
Related reading
Make good practice the default, not the effort
SaharaDesk turns these habits into workflow — thresholds that apply themselves, registers that stay honest, records that survive turnover.