CAFM for industrial and manufacturing sites On an industrial site the facilities function and the production function are the same argument, and the plant in dispute is usually the thing that stops everything if it fails.
Maintenance needs the line stopped and production needs it running, so planned work is deferred for commercially sensible reasons until the deferral is the reason something breaks. The statutory picture is heavier here than in commercial property too: lifting equipment, pressure systems and extraction are examined on their own cycles while in daily use, so the examination and the output have to be planned together rather than in competition.
What actually goes wrong
Planned work loses to output, quietly
Each deferral is defensible on its own. Nothing records that the same decision has now been taken eleven times to the same asset.
The shutdown window is measured in hours
Intrusive work happens in a slot scheduled months ahead. Anything that misses it waits for the next one, and what was outstanding going in is usually estimated rather than known.
Permits that carry real consequences
Hot works, confined spaces and isolations on an operating site are controls rather than paperwork. Who was permitted to do what, and when, is a record worth holding before anybody needs it.
Deferred work that stays visible as deferred
Holding planned maintenance against the asset does not win the argument with production, and it is not meant to. It makes the trade-off explicit, so a task that slips slips because somebody decided it could — and an asset that has absorbed eleven of those decisions reads as a risk rather than as a clean schedule.
- Planned maintenance scheduled per asset and site
- Asset register with criticality and full service history
- Statutory examination routines, with findings raised as jobs
Walk into a shutdown knowing the list
The work available in a short window is whatever is genuinely outstanding, and that is a question about records rather than memory. Jobs and planned tasks in one place mean the shutdown scope is assembled from the system, which also means the things that did not fit are still on it afterwards.
Permits and contractors on the same record as the work
Specialist examiners and contractors attend under their own accreditation, usually to plant that is live. Holding insurance, accreditation expiry and the permit against the job is what makes who was working on something, and under what authority, a lookup rather than an investigation.
Questions from industrial sites
- Does it track statutory examinations?
- Routines run per asset, with findings raised as jobs. What regime applies to a given item, and at what interval, is a determination for you and your competent person — the system holds the routine you set, it does not decide it.
- Does it connect to plant telemetry or condition monitoring?
- No. It is not a BMS, a SCADA system or condition monitoring, and it takes no live data. It records the asset and the work carried out on it.
- Can it show what breakdowns are costing us?
- It shows failures by asset and site, and holds no financial data. Any cost argument is one you build from your own figures, using this as the evidence of what failed and how often — which is usually the part that was missing.
Planned maintenance
PPM schedules that survive a busy week — recurring work planned against the asset, what is slipping visible before it lapses, and evidence captured at the point the job is closed.
Statutory compliance
The checks a duty holder is legally expected to run, scheduled against the assets they apply to, with the certificate that evidences each one filed where an auditor can find it.
Contractors & permits
Who you use, what they are approved to do, and whether their insurance and accreditations are still valid — checked before the job, not after the incident.
Building a PPM schedule that covers your statutory duties
Most teams do not lack a PPM schedule. They lack one that gets finished, and one that can be shown to cover the duties they actually hold. Here is how to build both at once.
Permits to work and contractor control
Contractor control fails in one specific way: a certificate that was valid at approval and was not valid on the day they attended. How to build a regime that notices.
See it running on your own buildings.
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