A key part of maintenance management, maintenance scheduling is a strategic process that helps reduce unexpected machine downtime, expensive device breakdowns, and safety risks. As a result, timely maintenance may lower your company’s costs and improve productivity.
Nowadays, maintenance scheduling is often done via service and maintenance scheduling software. These programs not only help plan maintenance tasks, but they also usually offer maintenance tracking features that provide you with a better overview of the maintenance activities.
Best practices for maintenance scheduling
There are 4 main approaches to maintenance scheduling:
- Time-based maintenance: Maintenance is planned at fixed time intervals.
- Usage-based maintenance: Maintenance is not based on time intervals, but rather to production cycles or runtime hours.
- Condition-based maintenance: A maintenance task is triggered by the current condition of the machinery, usually monitored by sensors (e.g., when the machine starts overheating).
- Reactive maintenance: Usually the most expensive approach, maintenance is not done preventively, but after a device breaks down.
Most organizations choose one of the first three options that help minimize the risk of unexpected downtimes. However, some companies underestimate preventive maintenance and act only reactively, when a machine stops due to a failure, which can be costly.