What planned maintenance is for

Planned maintenance is everything that’s decided before it’s needed: periodic checks, mandatory inspections, scheduled replacements. Its opposite is corrective maintenance, which gets decided once something has already broken and, therefore, at the worst possible moment.

The difference between having a maintenance plan and having a genuine planned maintenance program is that the second one demands attention. A plan in a spreadsheet doesn’t complain when March’s check doesn’t happen; it simply rolls over to April, and from April to next year. Here are the concrete things a program that actually demands attention delivers.

Defining periodicity once, for many pieces of equipment

The first thing it solves is the work of configuring it. In GMAO Cloud, the checklist of checks doesn’t have to be assigned equipment by equipment: it can be attached to a specific asset, to its model, or to an entire family. If you have two hundred fire extinguishers, one hundred twenty air conditioning units, or forty identical automatic doors, the check gets defined once for the whole family and only gets tweaked where a specific unit has something unusual.

Periodicity supports more than one cycle on the same asset, which is how reality actually works: the monthly check is one thing and the annual one is another, and neither replaces the other. Each period tracks its own record of when it was last executed, so the system knows which one is due first.

Letting orders generate on their own, on a day that actually exists

Periodicity produces real work orders, with a technician and a date, not just reminders. This seems like a small detail, and it’s the point where most plans fall apart: a task that isn’t assigned to anyone belongs to nobody.

Before generating the order, the system checks two things a spreadsheet ignores: whether that day is a holiday and whether the technician is available. Scheduling a check for August 15th, or for someone who’s on vacation, isn’t planning; it’s manufacturing a delay in advance.

Seeing the work spread across a calendar

There’s no point planning if whoever has to execute it can’t see it. The calendar shows what’s happening each day, whose it is, and what’s left unassigned — which is usually the most useful piece of information on the screen: what has no owner is what’s going to fall through.

When something needs moving — and something always needs moving — you drag it to another day. Diagram-style planning lets you see each technician’s load across the weeks, which is what avoids the usual pattern of half the team being overwhelmed while the other half waits around.

Not letting the technician close without checking

A preventive check with no record of what was verified doesn’t count as a check: it’s closer to a visit. That’s why preventive orders carry their checklists, and the technician app won’t let the order close until they’ve been filled in.

Checklist fields aren’t just boxes: they support values with a minimum and maximum, so a reading outside range gets recorded as an anomaly right then, not as a note on the side that nobody’s going to read. The app works without coverage and syncs afterward, which is what makes this possible in a plant room or a basement.

Alerting before, not after

The notification system is what turns planning into something that actually happens. The technician gets alerted about the order assigned to them; status changes can trigger an email; there are scheduled alerts for next week’s work.

And there’s one type of alert people tend to forget about until they need it: expiry alerts. Documentation attached to an asset — certificates, official inspections, technical data sheets — can carry an expiry date, and the system checks daily for what’s about to expire. The same applies to staff personal protective equipment.

What information stays attached to the asset

A detail often overlooked when comparing programs: where the documentation ends up. Certificates from an official inspection, the manufacturer’s technical data sheet, the manual, the delivery note from the last repair.

In GMAO Cloud, documents hang off the asset, but also off the customer, the address, the system, the issue, the quote, the order, the machine model or the family, among other entities. That means documentation lives where people actually go looking for it, instead of in a shared folder full of file names with three different version numbers.

Each document also carries its own visibility settings: whether the customer sees it, whether the technician sees it, whether the provider sees it. That avoids the awkward situation of deciding by hand what to show every time someone asks for something. And the technician has all that documentation in front of them on mobile, right within asset management, without calling the office.

Knowing afterward whether the plan was met

The last benefit is the one that justifies all the others. With orders closed using real data, reports answer questions that have no answer without records: what percentage of the annual preventive plan has been executed, which equipment concentrates the anomalies, how many hours went to preventive versus corrective work, how much each asset costs to maintain.

That comparison is what lets you correct the plan. Equipment that fails between checks needs more frequency; equipment that never causes problems is probably overmaintained, and that also costs money. Without history, periodicity gets decided once and never touched again.

Where mandatory maintenance fits

A good share of a company’s planned maintenance isn’t decided by the company itself: it’s set by a regulation or the equipment manufacturer. In GMAO Cloud that isn’t a separate module, and it’s worth knowing before you go looking for one: legally required maintenance is done through this same preventive maintenance mechanism, by attaching the checklist the regulation requires and its periodicity. What’s left afterward — the order history, completed checklists and documentation with its dates — is what serves as proof in an inspection or a claim.

The software records and proves. It’s the company that complies with the regulation.

Where to start

With critical assets, not the full inventory. The equipment that halts production or service if it fails, with its checklist and periodicity, and work outward from there. It’s faster to get running and, above all, it lets the team see results before getting tired of entering data.

If you’d like to see how it would look with your own equipment and your own periodicities, you can request a demo.