How to set up and manage Preventive Maintenance Schedules?

If a Preventative Maintenance program is already in place I would asses that program first. Are the right things being inspected/serviced? Is the correct schedule in place? Is there anything else you want to add?

I would then get asset’s, locations and teams/personnel built. That way when you build out the repeating work order’s those things are available already. Now, you can do this from the work order your building but I find it much easier if you they are ready to go prior.

Digitize your existing procedure’s. The MaintainX team can be helpful with this and have always been a great resource for us.

Build the work orders.

If you are just getting started doing Preventative Maintenance the steps would be pretty similar except your first going to have to do some background research. A lot of time you can find recommendations for Preventative Maintenance procedures and schedule within equipment manuals or best practice recommendations on the old interwebs.

I’m generalizing a bit here so if anyone has specific help they're for reach out anytime. 

We have a pm every 90 days on our equipment. so, I just set a w/o that is recurring every 90 days. I set it to show 30 days before it is due that way it will let me forecast what will be due for the next month. have 30 trailers and 28 trucks.

We have reoccurring preventive maintenance scheduled monthly to ensure our technicians are servicing our equipment which prolongs the life of our equipment.  Also, we have annual PMs scheduled for seasonality so that we are prepared for the upcoming weather conditions.  This allows us to stay open and operating which is a huge task when you are operating 400 locations and hundreds of pieces of equipment. Creating reoccurring PMs have drastically reduced our downtime and have strengthened our overall product.  You can set your PMs to reoccur any date range that fits your specific need. 

We have many pieces of equipment that we do weekly PM and inspections. I have scheduled specific days for each of these and opened recurring work orders for each with the manufacturers procedures attached. I then had checklists that have to be completed to verify they have been done and also to keep from forgetting a specific step.

We have also set up work orders that will cover monthly, quarterly, bi-annually and annually inspected and maintained processes.

If you assets and teams are in place, it makes this process a lot quicker and smoother.

Good luck.

Great answers! Chris lays it out well and touches on one thing that I appreciate about MaintainX. while it is best to set up as much as possible ahead of time, in the event that you need to do something on the fly, the system will walk you through as many pieces of the puzzle as you need to. You can start with the work order and as you come up on things that aren’t set up yet (assets, vendors, parts) MaintainX gives you the opportunity to set those up at that time and walks you right back to where you were in setting up the PM process. No matter how many rabbit trails you need to go down, the system will get you where you need to go until the process is complete.

Interested in how others are setting up repeating work orders for assets that have multiple PM schedule frequencies. i.e.- I have a piece of equipment that requires the following:

• Jan-Quarterly
• April-Semi-Annual
• Jul-Quarterly
• Oct-Annual

Would you create a separate repeating work order using an annual frequency for each month PM’s are due? OR Would you use a quarterly schedule and note the month for which each PM frequency needs to be completed? OR…..??

@jm408 Good question! 
There are a few potential solutions that would work, it depends on a few factors:

• Are all of those PMs the same? For example - would the instructions to perform the April-Semi-Annual PM be the same as the Jul-Quarterly?

If there is some overlap, but the Annual and Semi-Annual require additional steps, I would advise the following:

Create 1 PM procedure with the work that has to be applied on the quarterly basis. Next, create 2 copies of that procedure and label one of them with ‘Semi-Annual’ in the title and ‘Annual’ in the other title. Add the corresponding extra steps to each of those procedures.

From there, I’d create the ‘Quarterly PM’ in Jan and set to recur every 6 months (so that it pops up again in July). Then create 2 separate annually recurring PMs, one for the Semi-Annual and another for the Annual. 

In total, you will create 3 separate recurring work orders that will populate at the right times. 

Alternatively, you could build all of the PM instructions into conditional steps within a single procedure. Depending on how you set this up, it could make it easier to have a single procedure to manage and keep up to date (especially if you think you’ll need to update it over time). 

From there, you can add conditional fields to determine which steps should be shown to the technician. For example, if you include a step at the start that asks what month it is (single select field option), you could create conditional steps that show the extra PM steps needed. For example, if the user selects ‘April’, it shows the instructions for Semi-Annual PM. 

If you choose this method, you can create a single work order and schedule it to show every 3 months. The potential drawback is ensuring you implement a conditional step question that will be relatively foolproof and very for your techs. If you made a procedure question that asked if they should be doing a semi-annual PM, if the tech isn’t sure, they might select the wrong option and not see the extra steps. Or they select the semi-annual option and perform unnecessary extra steps (and possibly replace parts and time)

Let me know if that makes sense!

Hello Nick,

Thank you for the  detailed response and options for setting up a schedule with different time based work procedures. In this particular asset’s case, the Quarterly procedure would be considered the “base” PM scope, with the semi-annual and annual requiring additive PM scope/steps. I think I’ll try the method using the conditional step as our PM schedules tend to shift based on site access, so having one schedule to manage per asset might be easier.  
 

Thanks again!