PPM is one of those initialisms that means two entirely unrelated things, and which one you have found depends on which trade you are standing in. In a laboratory or a water treatment plant it is parts per million, a concentration. In a building it is planned preventative maintenance: servicing done to a schedule because the asset is due, rather than because it has broken. This page is about the second, which is the sense a facilities manager, a managing agent or a maintenance supervisor means, and it sets out what a PPM regime is actually made of.
What planned preventative maintenance is, as distinct from fixing things
Reactive maintenance responds to a failure: something stops, somebody reports it, an engineer attends. Planned preventative maintenance happens on an interval decided in advance, whether or not anything appears to be wrong, because the point is to find the wear before it becomes the failure. That is the whole idea, and everything else about PPM, the schedules, the check sheets, the certificates, exists to make it happen reliably and to show afterwards that it did.
What a PPM regime is made of
Three things. An asset register: what is on site that has a planned service, where it is, and how often. A schedule: what is due this month, derived from those intervals. And a record of completion: the visit that happened, against the asset, with what it found. A regime missing the first is guessing, missing the second is drifting, and missing the third cannot be proved to anybody who asks. Most buildings have the first two in a spreadsheet and the third in a folder of emails.
Who does the PPM, and who owns the record
The work is usually done by contractors, sometimes several, each servicing their own plant. The record belongs to the building, not to them, and that distinction is the one that costs money when it is got wrong: a change of contractor takes the history with it unless the history was yours all along. Whoever holds the building's record should be the one who holds the schedule, and the contractor should be completing it rather than keeping their own.
Why the word preventative varies
British usage prefers planned preventative maintenance; American usage prefers preventive. They are the same regime and both are used interchangeably in tender documents, sometimes in the same paragraph. It matters only when you search: the two spellings return different results and different products, which is worth knowing when comparing what is on the market.
Questions people ask about ppm maintenance
What does PPM stand for in maintenance?
Planned preventative maintenance, sometimes written planned preventive maintenance. It is servicing on an interval decided in advance rather than in response to a failure.
Is PPM the same as parts per million?
No. They share the initialism and nothing else. Parts per million is a concentration used in water, air and chemical work; this sense is a maintenance regime in a building.
What is a PPM visit?
A scheduled attendance where an engineer performs a defined set of checks on the assets due, records the results and raises defects for anything found. The free check sheet on this site sizes one from your own assets and checks.
Who is responsible for PPM in a building?
Whoever is responsible for the building: the facilities manager, the managing agent or the owner. The work is often contracted out, but the record and the consequences of it not happening stay with the building.