Maintenance schedule
A maintenance schedule is the plan of what servicing each item needs, at what interval, and who is responsible for doing it.
A maintenance schedule is the plan of what servicing each item needs, at what interval, and who is responsible for doing it.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: PM schedule, servicing schedule.
A schedule that only lists intervals is a wish. A usable one specifies, per item: what the task actually involves, when it is due and on what basis, who is responsible, and what evidence counts as completion.
The last one is the most frequently missing and the reason schedules quietly fail. If nothing records that a task was done, nobody can tell whether the schedule is being kept — and a schedule nobody verifies is indistinguishable from no schedule.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By usage wherever usage varies between identical items, since that is what drives wear. Keep calendar intervals for time-driven deterioration and for certification that expires on a date.
Detailed enough that someone who has not done it before can do it correctly, and short enough that they will. A checklist of the steps that matter beats a manual nobody opens.
Preventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
DefinitionA service history is the complete record of maintenance, repairs and inspections carried out on a specific item, with dates, work done and cost.
DefinitionCalibration is the documented comparison of an instrument's readings against a known reference, and any adjustment needed to bring it back within tolerance.
DefinitionEquipment downtime is time during which equipment is unavailable for its intended use, whether because it has failed or because it is being serviced.
DefinitionA work order is an instruction to carry out a specific piece of maintenance or repair on a specific item, tracked from raised to completed.
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