Maintenance management part 1: 5 steps to an effective maintenance plan

For technical facility management

To ensure efficient maintenance, it is important to create a comprehensive maintenance plan based on which the necessary measures are reliably listed. With the steps below you can optimize the flow of your maintenance activities and ensure that your systems run smoothly.

Step 1: Gather important information

To create your maintenance plan, you need certain qualitative and quantitative data that will help you accurately monitor the condition of your technical assets. You should collect the following information:

• Details about the companies and people involved: Who is responsible for what? Who has what expertise? What are the contractual basis? How do I communicate with my contact person (contact details, communication channels)?

• Details about the systems: You also need a list of your systems including name, type of equipment, technical documents and work instructions for maintenance.

Ideally, you should assign the technical systems to the locations and buildings to make it easier to plan the sequence on the test day.

Step 2: Record specifications and legal regulations

Before starting the maintenance plan, it is important to determine the scope of the work. Take into account legal requirements, manufacturer recommendations as well as feedback from users and previous maintenance. This initial assessment gives you a clear overview of the minimum maintenance intervals and types that must be adhered to.

Step 3: Define maintenance levels

To effectively manage maintenance activities, it is essential to assign maintenance levels to each piece of equipment. In general there are three types of maintenance:

• Periodic Maintenance: Scheduled periodic maintenance to recalibrate the equipment or replace parts according to a predefined schedule.

• Conditional maintenance: monitoring equipment performance and taking maintenance actions when certain parameters reach critical values.

By dividing your systems into these maintenance levels, you can effectively plan and prioritize your maintenance activities.

Step 4: Determine and plan maintenance intervals

In the most common case and ideally, maintenance takes place as scheduled at regular intervals. Based on the previously defined parameters, the maintenance intervals for the individual systems can be determined in this step.

• For regular maintenance work: Determine the length of the maintenance interval for each device and determine the responsible/performing technician

• For conditional maintenance: Determine alert thresholds for different device categories to define conditional and predictive maintenance actions.

To optimize workload, assess the amount of work required for regular maintenance. This allows you to plan maintenance appointments taking into account the available resources.

Automatic setting and assignment of maintenance appointments ensures that no appointment is missed in the future.

Step 5: Subsequent documentation

In the final step, proof and documentation of the completed maintenance tasks takes place – for internal and external purposes. Follow-up tasks that arise on site during maintenance work should also be created as a process immediately.

Conclusion

You can use the procedure described in this article to create a well-structured maintenance plan. This helps you optimize your maintenance activities and never miss a maintenance appointment. Additionally, implementing a digital solution like iHive can make managing your maintenance plan much easier.