What is planned preventative maintenance (PPM)?
Planned preventative maintenance is work carried out to a schedule to keep assets working and compliant, rather than in response to a failure. It is the backbone of a maintenance regime.
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<img src="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/planned-preventative-maintenance/diagram.svg" alt="planned preventative maintenance — diagram from FacilityOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/planned-preventative-maintenance">What is planned preventative maintenance (PPM)?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk">FacilityOptix</a>
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</figure>Its purpose is to move work from unplanned to planned. Unplanned work costs more, happens at the worst time and is done under pressure, so a regime that converts even part of it into scheduled tasks pays for itself before any asset lasts longer.
Not all of it is discretionary. A significant portion of a building's PPM schedule exists because a regulation or a standard requires it, and those tasks cannot be deferred on cost grounds the way a discretionary service can.
The schedule is only as good as its completion record. A plan showing a year of tasks and a record showing which were actually done, when and by whom are two different documents, and only the second is evidence.
In practice
A schedule delivered in full every month, and a building that keeps failing.
Every visit is attended, signed and invoiced. The failures are in assets that are not on the schedule at all, because the schedule was inherited with the building and nobody ever reconciled it against what is actually installed.
A PPM regime is only as complete as the asset register underneath it, and a perfect completion rate against an incomplete list looks exactly like success.
The useful audit is not whether visits happened but which assets have never had one.
What goes wrong in practice
- A schedule built from a previous building's regime rather than from this one's asset register.
- Statutory and discretionary tasks mixed in one list, so both get deferred with equal ease.
- Tasks marked complete with no engineer record or certificate attached.
- The schedule never revised as assets were replaced or removed.