Preventive maintenance (PM) is scheduled inspection, cleaning, adjustment and repair of equipment before it fails. A PM program works when you know every asset you own, decide what maintenance each one needs, focus first on your most critical assets, and match the workload to the labor hours you actually have. This guide explains what preventive maintenance is, its types and benefits, and how to build a preventive maintenance plan in seven steps.
You already know preventive is better than reactive when it comes to asset maintenance. Nobody wants to explain to leadership why an emergency replacement is eating the budget because an old asset died. The hard part is HOW to move from reactive to proactive maintenance. That’s what this guide is for.
Preventive Maintenance Guide for Facilities Table of Contents
Click any of the following links to jump straight to the topic you’re looking for.
-
What is preventive maintenance?
-
The four main components of preventive maintenance
-
Key benefits of preventive maintenance
-
Reactive vs. preventive maintenance
-
Types of preventive maintenance
-
Using preventive maintenance to reduce risk
-
How to create a preventive maintenance plan in 7 steps
-
Preventive maintenance tasks by building system
-
Preventive maintenance FAQ
-
More resources on preventive maintenance
What is preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance (also sometimes called “preventative” maintenance) aims to predict and prevent catastrophic equipment failures before they occur. To do this, facilities personnel conduct routine inspections, maintenance, and repairs on assets to ensure they’re functioning properly and efficiently – instead of waiting until the asset breaks down or starts acting up. Functioning equipment means you can focus less on reactive maintenance and more on upcoming maintenance tasks or time-sensitive work orders.
It’s better to prevent issues than react to them. By taking the necessary steps to ensure assets are performing optimally, preventive maintenance drastically reduces the likelihood of unexpected issues. Examples of preventive maintenance actions include:
- Scheduling and performing regular inspections of equipment
- Conducting regular cleaning of buildings, grounds, and assets
- Lubricating moving parts to reduce wear and tear
- Adjusting controls for optimal performance and energy efficiency
- Repairing and replacing any defective equipment parts
What are the Four Main Components of Preventive Maintenance?
Inspection: Inspections are necessary for two reasons. First, facility inspections ensure that equipment is safe to use. They help prevent workplace injuries and increase liability protection. Second, regular inspections protect property by ensuring that equipment is functioning as the manufacturer intended.
Detection: Operating on a run-to-failure approach can end up costing a facility department significant money. Preventive maintenance helps facility managers detect problems early, when issues are still relatively easy and inexpensive to fix.
Correction: Preventive maintenance corrects issues before they occur. If an issue (or potential issue) is detected, facility managers promptly address the problem before it worsens or shuts down operations.
Prevention: Facility managers analyze inspection records and maintenance notes to learn from past mistakes and correct repeated issues with equipment. Preventing asset failure reduces stress and increases productivity for facilities teams. When equipment works as it’s supposed to, staff can focus on proactive (rather than reactive) maintenance tasks.
What are the Benefits of Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance has two overarching goals: to increase asset longevity and productivity and to keep people and assets safe from harm. The principles of preventive maintenance enable you to:
- Diminish excess depreciation of equipment
- Prevent untimely breakdowns of critical equipment
- Eliminate unnecessary inspections and maintenance tasks
- Save money by extending the useful life of assets
- Prepare for and prevent future issues from occurring
- Regular maintenance can also lead to reduced energy bills. Equipment that works as expected is more likely to run efficiently and use less energy than unmaintained equipment.
- Following a maintenance schedule means you’ll be better prepared to stick to your department’s allocated budget. Repairs are planned in advance, so all costs associated with replacement parts and repair personnel are factored into the department’s budget.
Reactive vs. Preventive Maintenance
Reactive maintenance focuses on diagnosing and fixing a problem once an asset has already broken down or malfunctioned. A maintenance technician identifies the issue and takes steps to restore the asset to operational condition.
Preventive maintenance emphasizes regularly scheduled maintenance tasks. The goal is to give an asset the care it requires while it’s still running. This approach actively minimizes the chance of failure, costly repairs, and unscheduled downtime.
Read More: Preventive vs. Reactive Maintenance: What’s the Difference?
A common misconception is that reactive maintenance is a bad thing. The truth is that most facilities departments experience a healthy balance between reactive maintenance and preventive maintenance throughout the year. That’s because it’s nearly impossible to predict and prevent all asset failures. Things can and will go wrong.
However, you want to minimize the amount of reactive maintenance whenever possible. After all, nobody enjoys dealing with a broken air conditioner or leaky pipe.
What are the Different Types of Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance can follow a time-based approach, a usage-based approach, or a combination of the two. Let’s look at examples of each.
Time-based Preventive Maintenance
Time-based preventive maintenance goes by a variety of names, a main one being “calendar-based” maintenance. No matter which term your department uses, this approach involves setting up a preventive maintenance schedule to perform regular inspections on pieces of equipment, especially those that would have a severe impact on production in the event of a breakdown.
Time-based preventive maintenance is best used for bounded assets (such as fire/safety equipment) and critical assets (such as HVAC systems and pumps), though you can use this approach for any asset that requires preventive maintenance. For example:
- “Inspect parking lot for cracks once a month”
- “Change air handling unit filters every three months”
- “Inspect water heaters semi-annually”
Usage-based Preventive Maintenance
Usage-based maintenance, also called “runtime maintenance,” is an approach that triggers maintenance after a certain amount of asset runtime (such as every “X” amount of kilometers, miles, hours, or production cycles).
Unlike time-based maintenance, which occurs on a more rigid schedule, usage-based maintenance occurs as often as an asset needs it, whether it’s every month or every six months. For example:
- “Inspect belts every 100 hours of production”
- “Service motor vehicles every 5,000 miles”
- “Lubricate pumps every 10,000 run-hours”
How Can Preventive Maintenance Reduce Risk in My Facility?
All facilities face potential risks which, left unchecked, can put workers, occupants, and the mission of an organization in jeopardy. As a facility professional, you’re responsible for securing these risks and ensuring safety in your facilities. A strong preventive maintenance plan can effectively reduce the two types of risk to your buildings.
Preventive maintenance reduces risk to people
Facility managers have the power to prevent injuries and reduce employees’ days spent away from work. Preventive maintenance supports the safety and security of equipment for all occupants.
You can keep people safe by conducting recurring maintenance and inspections on dangerous machinery. Do the same with security cameras, door locks, fire extinguishers, emergency exit signs, and any other asset that safeguards people from harm.
Preventive maintenance reduces risk to property
Reactive maintenance can be expensive. It’s not cheap when an asset breaks down unexpectedly, including costs to diagnose the issue, replace parts, and ultimately fix the problem. Preventive maintenance can dramatically reduce the likelihood of these risks.
Facility managers should implement routine asset checks and planned maintenance to avoid costly fixes down the road. Use this Facility Inspection Preparation Checklist to determine assets you should regularly inspect.
How Do I Create a Preventive Maintenance Plan? 7 Steps
Many facility managers like the idea of preventive maintenance but get stuck on where to start. These seven steps take you from “we should be doing more PM” to a plan your team can actually complete.
Step 1: Build a complete, accurate asset inventory
You can’t maintain what you don’t know you have. Start with a full list of your assets and where they are. There are two common ways to get there: a facility condition assessment (FCA) from an assessment firm, ideally one that stays connected to your work orders and inspections instead of sitting in a static report, or collecting the data yourself with a mobile app like AkitaBox Capture.
Whichever route you take, record at least these fields for every asset:
- Asset details: asset name, category (HVAC, plumbing, electrical), type (boiler, air compressor, pump), manufacturer, model and serial number
- Photos: the asset, its nameplate, and its surroundings
- Location: building, floor, room name and number, and the asset’s spot on the floor plan
Step 2: Decide what PM each asset needs
For each asset, find the recommended tasks and frequencies in the manufacturer’s O&M manual or website, applicable codes and industry standards, and advice from trusted technicians or contractors. Decide whether each task should be time-based or usage-based (see types of preventive maintenance). Note what each task takes: travel time, special or rented tools, skill level, and whether an outside specialist is required.
Step 3: Know your resources
Decide which PM tasks your team will handle in-house and which go to contractors or service partners. Identify those partners now so tasks don’t stall when they come due.
Step 4: Identify and rank your most critical assets
Not every asset deserves the same attention. An asset is more critical when it serves an important room or space, costs far more to replace than to repair, creates serious risk if it goes offline, or supports another critical asset. Start with the most critical 5–10% of assets in each building, rank them, and attach their required PM tasks. For some low-impact assets, running to failure with a spare on hand can be the smarter choice.
Step 5: Estimate PM hours for your key assets
Assign a time estimate to each PM task on your critical assets, and split the total into in-house hours and contracted hours.
Step 6: Compare PM hours to the labor you actually have
Your team doesn’t spend its whole day on PM. Service requests, projects and emergencies take their share, so a technician may only have a fraction of each day for planned work. Compare your PM hours to that real capacity. If the plan doesn’t fit, you can trim the list to the most critical assets, add staff, bring in contractors, or lengthen intervals for assets with a strong performance history. Avoided early replacements of major equipment often cost more than an added technician, so run the numbers before deciding.
Step 7: Schedule, assign and track the plan
Load the plan into your maintenance software so PM work orders are created, assigned and tracked automatically. Spreadsheets break down quickly once you have recurring tasks across many assets. As the plan runs:
- Tie each PM schedule to the specific asset and its location so technicians don’t waste time hunting for equipment.
- Keep manuals, procedures, warranty and recall information with the asset record.
- Adjust schedules for buildings or spaces that are used less during parts of the year.
- Report open PM tasks against reactive work orders so PM doesn’t quietly slip.
- Review maintenance history regularly and adjust frequencies based on how assets actually perform.
Need a starting point for basic mechanical equipment? A simple recurring checklist covers general cleaning and inspection of the unit, changing air filters, checking and adjusting belt tension, checking motor amps on each phase, and checking actuator valve operation.
For worksheets and examples for each step, download The Step by Step Guide to Building a Preventive Maintenance Plan.
How facility management software supports your PM plan
The right software makes each step above easier to sustain:
- Location-based asset mapping: every asset is a pin on your digital floor plan, so technicians can find and service equipment by type or location.
- PM scheduling and work orders: recurring PM tasks generate work orders automatically and are assigned to the right person.
- AI-powered data collection: with AkitaBox Capture, a photo of a manufacturer label fills in the asset record. Collect data at the speed of walking your building.
- Documents in one place: O&M manuals, warranties and receipts stay attached to each asset and are available in the field.
- Reporting dashboards: see overdue work orders, PM completion and work orders by asset.
- Mobile access and QR codes: scan an asset’s QR code to see its PM history and upcoming tasks, without printing work orders.
What Preventive Maintenance Tasks Should Be on My List?
Exact tasks and intervals come from manufacturer recommendations, codes, and your own maintenance history. These are common starting points by building system:
- HVAC: replace air filters on a set schedule; inspect and adjust belts; clean coils; check motor amps and actuator valves; have systems inspected by a qualified technician at least once a year.
- Electrical: inspect panels and connections; test emergency and exit lighting; schedule a professional electrical inspection after renovations, additions or major new equipment loads; use licensed, insured contractors.
- Fire and life safety: inspect fire extinguishers monthly and maintain them annually under NFPA 10; test fire alarm and sprinkler systems on the schedules in NFPA 72 and NFPA 25 and your local fire code; keep exits clear and your egress plan current.
- Plumbing: inspect water heaters, valves and backflow preventers; check for leaks and corrosion.
- Building envelope and grounds: inspect roofs, doors, windows and parking lots for damage before it spreads.
When it’s time to decide whether to keep maintaining an aging asset or replace it, compare its remaining life and repair costs. See how to calculate equipment depreciation life.
Preventive Maintenance FAQ
Is it “preventive” or “preventative” maintenance?
Both are correct and mean the same thing. “Preventive” is more common in facility management.
How often should preventive maintenance be done?
It depends on the asset. Start with the manufacturer’s recommendation and any code requirements, use time-based schedules for safety and critical equipment and usage-based schedules for equipment with variable runtime, then adjust based on maintenance history.
How much of our maintenance should be preventive?
There’s no single right ratio, and some reactive work is unavoidable. Aim to cover your most critical assets with PM first, then expand as your labor hours allow.
Do I need software to run a preventive maintenance program?
Small programs can start on paper, but once you have recurring tasks across many assets and buildings, maintenance software is the most reliable way to schedule, assign and track PM work.
Where Can I Find More Free Resources on Preventive Maintenance?
Download The Step by Step Guide to Building a Preventive Maintenance Plan
The Step by Step Guide to Building a Preventive Maintenance Plan walks through each step above in more detail, including how to rank critical assets and compare PM hours with your available labor.
Download AkitaBox’s Preventive Maintenance Checklist
Keep the focus on preventive maintenance versus reactive maintenance with the Ultimate Preventive Maintenance Checklist. This step-by-step checklist covers asset identification, naming conventions, and data collection accuracy.
Compare preventive and reactive maintenance
Still making the case for PM? Read Preventive vs. Reactive Maintenance: What’s the Difference?
Speak with a facility management industry advisor
It’s a good idea to talk with a facility management professional who can coach you through preventive maintenance best practices for your buildings and industry. Our team will work with you to identify the right processes and tools. You can contact us here.
Implementing Preventive Maintenance in Your Facility
Preventive maintenance can seem like an overhead cost that is, at first, difficult to justify. But it only takes one serious accident or significant period of downtime to show why a proactive approach matters.
By staying ahead of maintenance and repair needs, your organization will see cost savings and higher asset reliability. The Step by Step Guide to Building a Preventive Maintenance Plan is a great place to start.
