10 tips for a maintenance manager

A maintenance manager spends the day putting out fires, and that’s exactly the problem: while the day fills up with corrective work, there’s no time left for what would prevent next month’s corrective work. These ten points are about breaking that cycle.

1. Decide what’s critical before a breakdown decides for you

Not every piece of equipment deserves the same attention. Properly rating your asset base — what stops production or service if it fails, what poses a risk to people, what has a regulatory obligation — is the decision that pays off the most, because it determines where effort goes.

It’s also the only way to defend a plan to management: not “we need to check everything,” but “these twenty assets are the ones that can shut us down.”

2. Make preventive maintenance an order, not an intention

A task that only lives on a calendar doesn’t fall through loudly: it falls through silently. What keeps it alive is being a work order with an owner and a date.

In a management system that’s configured once: the checklist plan attached to the asset, its model, or an entire family, and its frequency. From there, preventive maintenance generates itself.

3. Plan against real availability

Scheduling a check for a public holiday or for someone who’s on vacation isn’t planning — it’s manufacturing a delay in advance. Before generating the order, you need to check the work calendar and the technician’s availability.

And you have to look at workload, not just dates. A calendar with the schedule laid out as a diagram is what prevents the usual pattern: half the team overloaded and the other half waiting.

4. Measure the time, don’t remember it

Hours jotted down from memory at the end of the day always come out low. With that data you can’t calculate the cost of a job or know whether a contract is profitable.

A stopwatch built into the work order itself, in the technician’s app, is a small change with big consequences: for the first time, you know what things actually cost.

5. Get the knowledge out of people’s heads

In almost every department there are two people who know how each piece of equipment is serviced. When one of them leaves, part of the operation leaves with them.

Checklists are the practical way to write it down: what to check, in what order, and with what reference values. Defined by equipment family and fine-tuned only where needed, they’re not a documentation project — they’re an afternoon’s work.

6. Record values, not checkboxes

A checklist of checkboxes says whether it was checked. One with values says what was found. The difference shows up months later, when you want to know whether a piece of equipment was giving warning signs before it failed.

If fields allow a minimum and maximum, an out-of-range reading is logged as an anomaly on the spot, instead of a side comment nobody will ever reread.

7. Close the loop on anomalies

This is where most systems die. A technician spots something, logs it, and nothing happens. By the third time, they stop logging it, and rightly so.

An anomaly has to turn into an issue with its priority and owner, or into an explicit decision to do nothing. Both outcomes are valid; silence isn’t.

8. Control materials before you need them

A check that can’t be done because a part is missing is a check that didn’t happen, and with a paid trip on top. The warehouse module with minimum stock levels per item warns you beforehand; batches with expiry dates prevent the other kind of surprise.

The key is that consumption gets recorded when the order is closed, not in a later entry. Otherwise the system’s stock and the real stock will always be two different things.

9. Measure four indicators, not twenty

A dashboard with thirty figures doesn’t get looked at. Four does:

• Ratio of preventive to corrective hours. Better than anything else at describing whether the operation is proactive or reactive.
• Mean time between failures (MTBF) for critical equipment: measures reliability.
• Mean time to repair (MTTR): measures response capacity.
• Accumulated cost per asset: the one that lets you decide whether a machine gets repaired again or replaced.

All of them come from the reports, and all of them depend on someone having recorded the data when it happened.

10. Make the team want to use the system

This is the one that decides whether the other nine happen at all. The system is fed by the technician, and they’ll feed it if it saves them work, not if it adds to it.

What works: having the equipment’s history and documentation on the phone without calling the office, being able to sort work orders by route so they don’t cross the city twice, not having to repeat data, and everything working without coverage, because maintenance happens in basements and machine rooms.

And what doesn’t work: asking them to fill in fields that serve no purpose, or asking them to log things that nobody ever looks at afterward.

What’s worth reviewing every quarter

The ten points above describe how to work. This one describes when to stop and check whether it’s working, which is the part that always gets postponed.

A one-hour quarterly review, with the reports in front of you, answers four questions: what percentage of the annual preventive maintenance plan has actually been carried out, which assets concentrate the anomalies, which frequencies should go up or down, and which assets have accumulated a cost that no longer justifies repairing them.

That hour produces decisions worth more than weeks of operational work, and it’s the first thing to disappear from the agenda when the day fills up with urgent matters. Putting it on the calendar as just another order, with its own frequency, is a silly trick that works.

A note on regulatory obligations

If you have equipment subject to regulation, watch out for a common confusion: you don’t need a special module. Statutory maintenance is done with the same preventive maintenance mechanism, with the checklist plan the regulation requires and its frequency, and the proof comes from the history, the checklists, and the document management with its expiry dates.

What no software can do for you is comply with the regulation. It can only prove that you did.

If you want to see how all of this would be set up on your own asset base, you can request a demo.