Preventive Maintenance Scheduling – When Is It Excessive?

Preventive maintenance scheduling leading to complaints?

It does sound weird!

Have you ever had this happen to you?

For example, management or other departments complain that your preventive maintenance scheduling is too much. Maybe equipment is frequently unavailable because of scheduled preventive maintenance. In addition your team complains that they spend too much time checking equipment and doing preventative maintenance chores.

Depending on your work order backlog and who is complaining, you should take these complaints seriously or not!

Above all, questions by management and operations need to be properly answered. Complaints by your team may point to underlying problems that may require a review of the work being done.

So how do you know when to take these complaints seriously?

Possible signs preventive maintenance scheduling is in excess

1. Are other departments complaining?

They may complain often of lack of equipment availability causing customer complaints or production issues. If you get this a lot, you should review Equipment Maintenance Calendars in your preventive maintenance scheduling software with the responsible people from the other departments. For instance, you may find that rescheduling work or combining it may reduce many complaints.

2. Is management complaining?

This is usually because maintenance costs seem to be high. In addition, they may not understand the benefits of preventive maintenance. This can be handled by looking at the cost of equipment downtime. What happens if these equipment fail?

If you have historical data from your CMMS software you can see how preventive maintenance has reduced the costs of unplanned or breakdown maintenance. Being able to compare costs from prior periods will be helpful. Learn more in Auditing Your Maintenance Management Program.

Just think about it…

After that, you can share this data and conclusions with management so they understand how good a job you are doing!

3. Complaints from maintenance personnel?

This may have some justification. Firstly, review manufacturer recommendations. Secondly, look at your preventive maintenance plan.

See if you can reduce some preventive maintenance or roll up some preventive maintenance jobs together. Review maintenance task instructions. See if they can be simplified.

Discuss with maintenance personnel to find why the believe some preventive maintenance may be unnecessary. They may have good ideas that help combine two or more maintenance tasks into one. This will reduce maintenance time & costs!

Analysis & Collection Of Maintenance Data

In conclusion, to answer this question you need to be able to review and analyze a lot of your prior work order data. This will help you provide the right answers or make improvements. Therefore a good CMMS program can really help!

However, do you have suitable maintenance scheduling software? If not, you can get a free trial of FastMaint CMMS.

This CMMS Software Selection Guide can also be very helpful. It gives you a checklist of several selection criteria. Use them to identify the right maintenance management software for your needs. With hundreds of CMMS programs available, finding the one that will suit you can be a challenge!