← Equipment management glossary
Also called: PM schedule, servicing schedule.
The schedule was a good document. A year on, nobody could say which services had actually happened, because the only record of the programme was the document itself.
A schedule that only lists intervals is a wish. Four things make it usable, and the fourth is the one that quietly decides whether any of it works.
Four things a schedule has to specify
What the task involves
Per item, and specific enough that two people would do the same thing.
When it is due, and on what basis
Calendar where deterioration is time-driven; usage where wear is the driver. Most fleets need both, sometimes on the same item.
Who is responsible
A person, not a department, and reached by a reminder rather than by a document.
What counts as completion
If nothing records that a task was done, nobody can tell whether the schedule is being kept.
the one most often missingA schedule nobody verifies is indistinguishable from no schedule. A modest one that is genuinely completed and recorded beats a thorough one that exists mainly as a spreadsheet.
Calendar or usage
Calendar intervals are simple and right where deterioration is time-driven — seals perishing, batteries ageing, certification expiring.
Usage intervals — hours, cycles, kilometres — are right where wear is the driver. Servicing two identical machines annually when one does five times the work over-services one and under-services the other, and the under-serviced one is the one that fails.
Most fleets need both, sometimes on the same item: an annual safety inspection by calendar, and a service by running hours.
Why schedules stop being followed
Rarely because they were wrong. Nothing reminds anyone — the schedule lives in a document rather than arriving as a task on the day. It is too ambitious — thirty tasks per item is aspirational, and once people fall behind they stop trying. Completion is not recorded, so there is no feedback and no evidence.
A schedule covering the tasks that actually prevent failures, arriving as a reminder, with a recorded outcome, beats a comprehensive one that exists as a spreadsheet.
What goes wrong without it
A schedule with no reminder and no completion record cannot be audited or improved, so maintenance drifts back to being reactive while the document still claims otherwise.
How Itefy handles it
Itefy creates recurring maintenance per item, notifies the responsible user when it falls due, and records completion into the item's service history with costs. Recurring reservations are available from the Startup plan upward. Read more.