A planned preventative maintenance schedule is the working document of the whole regime, and it is almost always inherited rather than built. Somebody produced one when the building was handed over, and every year since it has been copied forward with adjustments. That is how a schedule ends up listing plant that was removed in 2022 and omitting the two units installed last spring. This page is about building one from the register, and about the three checks that tell you whether yours still describes the building it is supposed to cover.
What belongs in the schedule
Each asset, its location, the service interval, who performs it, the last completed date and the next due date. That is the whole document. Schedules that carry more than this, task lists, method statements, risk assessments, are trying to be the contract as well, and the parts that change most often get buried in the parts that never change.
The three checks that catch drift
First, walk one plant room and confirm every asset in it appears on the schedule. Second, take three assets from the schedule and find their last completed visit; if you cannot, the schedule is a plan rather than a record. Third, compare the asset count with last year's: a building whose count never changes is a building whose schedule is being copied rather than maintained.
Why the interval belongs on the asset
When intervals live in the calendar, moving a visit moves nothing else, and by the third move nobody knows which quarter an asset should be on. When the interval lives on the asset, the month's due list is derived every time it is asked for, and a moved visit changes only that visit. This is the single structural difference between a schedule that survives a year and one that does not.
Questions people ask about planned preventative maintenance schedule
What is a planned preventative maintenance schedule?
The list of assets with a planned service, their intervals, and what is due when. Built from the asset register, it produces the month's work; copied forward from last year, it produces last year's work.
How do I build ppm schedules for a new site?
Take the asset register from the handover documents, walk the plant rooms to confirm it, set intervals from the statutory requirement, the manufacturer and the duty, and only then put dates against them.
Should the schedule live with the contractor?
No. The contractor's copy is theirs and goes with them. The building's schedule and its completed visits should be held by whoever is responsible for the building.
How long does a visit on the schedule take?
Run the free check sheet with your assets, checks and minutes: it returns the hours a visit takes and what a year of the schedule comes to, which is the figure to test an interval against.