Executive summary
- System health is measured by the share of work planned before execution, not by budget spent.
- Failure coding on every work order is the highest-return, zero-capital improvement available.
- PM programmes inherited from commissioning must be rebuilt around asset criticality.
- Condition-based and predictive work only pay back once PM compliance exceeds roughly 90%.
- Modern maintenance management looks past 'the machine did not break' to company performance.
Planned maintenance is the maintenance department’s pillar: making sure everything beyond the operator’s scope — BM, PM, CM — is executed completely and at the right interval, alongside spare-parts management, support to autonomous maintenance, and maintenance data management.
Start with data integrity, not technology
The first improvement in almost every engagement costs nothing: the discipline of closing every work order with a failure code, a cause and the actual hours spent. Plants resist because it adds two minutes per job. Those two minutes are what make the next twelve months of analysis possible.
Manufacturing example
A packaging plant had 14 months of CMMS history and could not say which asset consumed the most maintenance hours, because 71% of work orders were closed against ‘breakdown — general’. Four weeks of coding discipline revealed that a single case packer accounted for 23% of all reactive hours. It had never appeared in a management review.
Rebuild the PM programme around criticality
- Rank assets by criticality Score production impact, safety and quality consequence, and redundancy. A 1–5 scale on three axes is enough.
- Map dominant failure modes For the top 20% of assets, use your own work-order history rather than the OEM manual.
- Match the task to the failure mode Time-based replacement suits age-related failure; random failure patterns need inspection or condition monitoring.
- Set and measure PM compliance Target above 90% within the scheduled window. Below that, every downstream metric is unreliable.
- Review and retire tasks Quarterly, remove PM tasks that have never found a defect. A programme that only grows is one nobody trusts.
Modern Maintenance Management
Modern maintenance management aims past ‘the machine did not break’ at improved company performance, through four emphases: developing the skills and knowledge of the maintenance team, strategic maintenance management, total participation across the organisation, and the use of information technology in maintenance work.
| Failure point | Symptom | Countermeasure |
|---|---|---|
| Technology before discipline | Dashboards installed while 60% of work orders are uncoded | Sequence it: measure, connect, predict, optimise |
| No released capacity | The planner spends the day dispatching emergencies | Deploy autonomous maintenance to free technician hours |
| Metrics nobody owns | OEE reported monthly, discussed by nobody daily | Tiered daily accountability with a named owner per loss |
| Decay after the project | Gains hold for one quarter, then drift | Monthly audit cadence and capability handover to internal staff |