{"id":69865,"date":"2024-03-21T14:00:43","date_gmt":"2024-03-21T19:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.projectmanager.com\/?p=69865"},"modified":"2026-04-28T14:49:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T19:49:12","slug":"maintenance-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.projectmanager.com\/blog\/maintenance-planning","title":{"rendered":"Maintenance Planning in Manufacturing & Other Industries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Manufacturing is an ongoing process. Making sure resources are in working order keeps production moving forward and helps you stay productive. This is true in other industries where maintenance planning is essential to successful projects and productivity.<\/p>\n

What do we mean when we say maintenance planning? We\u2019ll explain and show how it differs from maintenance scheduling. Then we\u2019ll explore the various types of maintenance planning strategies and how to create a maintenance plan, which can serve both manufacturers and construction professionals.<\/p>\n

What Is Maintenance Planning?<\/h2>\n

Maintenance planning is a process to determine which assets or facilities need to be kept up, where this needs to happen and with what frequency. This requires identifying the resources needed for maintenance. That can be anything from spare parts to materials to keep everything functional.<\/p>\n

Maintenance planning is responsible for ensuring that all assets are in good working order and being prepared to respond to minor to major issues as they arise. Things happen; equipment could fail or you need to keep machinery well-oiled and maintained so it works at its ideal capacity. Maintenance planning is a proactive step towards anticipating risk and keeping everything working at its best.<\/p>\n

Maintenance planning isn’t restricted to nonhuman resources but includes human resources. The ability to keep teams working at capacity, but not overworked and threaten burnout and poor morale requires project management software. ProjectManager<\/a> is award-winning project and portfolio management software that helps plan and manage resources in real time.<\/p>\n

Onboarding teams is easy and so is setting team availability, such as PTO, vacation time and global holidays, which makes assigning tasks a breeze. Then check out the color-coded workload chart. See at a glance who’s overallocated and balance their workload from the chart to keep everyone productive. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.<\/p>\n

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ProjectManager\u2019s workload chart keeps allocation balanced and teams productive. Learn more<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Types of Maintenance Planning Strategies<\/h2>\n

As previously mentioned, maintenance planning is top-level work. Therefore, it\u2019s strategic. But there\u2019s more than one type of maintenance planning strategy. Let\u2019s take a moment to review four of the most common maintenance planning strategies.<\/p>\n

Predictive Maintenance<\/h3>\n

As the name suggests, this maintenance planning strategy is all about foreseeing potential equipment failures using machine sensors and other advanced technologies. This includes visually inspecting the machinery, but using a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) creates greater efficiency as it can go through all your equipment inventory<\/a> faster, tracks meter readings and more. Of course, one must have the funds to invest in a CMMS.<\/p>\n

Preventive Maintenance<\/h3>\n

Also known as proactive maintenance, this approach will periodically pause operations to inspect or repair equipment. These set intervals are either time-based or event-driven. Either way, they aim to increase the lifespan of the assets by avoiding any debilitating malfunctions.<\/p>\n

Reactive Maintenance<\/h3>\n

Often called breakdown maintenance or run-to-failure, you can guess the philosophy behind this strategy: don\u2019t fix it until it’s broken. In this case, there’s no plan, so it’s best to use this strategy only on nonessential equipment or where operations<\/a> are at a low cost. There will be machines that are less expensive to fix when they\u2019re broken than regularly maintained, but you\u2019ll need to identify which ones.<\/p>\n

Condition-Based Maintenance<\/h3>\n

This looks at a single metric and checks it against preset thresholds. This is done by adding sensors to the machines and checking their health periodically. It compares these measurements against the baseline measurements for a healthy machine.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the Difference Between Maintenance Planning and Scheduling?<\/h2>\n

Maintenance planning and maintenance scheduling are related but not the same. As noted above, maintenance planning is a process for identifying and solving potential problems before they negatively impact production<\/a>. Therefore, look at maintenance planning as the high-level view of maintenance.<\/p>\n

Maintenance scheduling<\/a>, on the other hand, is the work to maintain resources and when it gets done. It\u2019s the who, what, when and where of tasks, done in a way that the organization gets the maximum amount of hours available, based on resources.<\/p>\n

Scheduled maintenance is usually organized by priority. For example, work orders<\/a> with the highest priority, which have the greatest impact, will go first. Maintenance schedules often use internal labor to cut costs and speed up work. Preventive maintenance is also part of scheduling maintenance, which minimizes downtime and increases efficiency.<\/p>\n

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Maintenance Schedule Template<\/h3>\n

\n\tUse this free Maintenance Schedule Template for Excel to manage your projects better.<\/p>\n\t\t