The Maintenance Management Cycle and Its Roles
How planned maintenance moves from identifying work to learning from it, and who does what.
11 min
Activities: 0 of 2
Planned preventive maintenance (PPM) is more than a calendar of service visits. It is a management cycle: work is identified, planned, scheduled, carried out, recorded and analysed, and the results change what is planned next. This course takes you through each stage for building and facilities plant — from choosing a strategy for each asset to turning a reactive site into a planned one.
It is written for maintenance supervisors, planners, facilities managers and engineers who already know the equipment and now need to run the programme well.
The maintenance management cycle
- 1
1
Identify
Work comes from the PPM schedule, inspections, condition monitoring, fault reports and follow-up notes from engineers. - 2
2
Plan
For each job: the task steps, skills, parts, tools, permits, isolation and estimated hours. - 3
3
Schedule
Decide when each planned job will be done, against the people actually available that week. - 4
4
Execute
Carry out the work safely and to the task instruction. - 5
5
Record
Readings, findings, parts used, time taken and any follow-up work, recorded on the work order. - 6
6
Analyse
Review failures, backlog and costs; adjust tasks, frequencies and strategies.
The main roles (one person may hold several)
Owns the strategy, budget and performance. Reports to the organisation in terms of risk, cost and availability.
Where the cycle breaks
A business park. PPM work orders were printed and handed out every Sunday, but nobody prepared parts or permits. Engineers spent much of each morning finding filters, keys and isolation points. Completion was low and blamed on "lack of staff". Adding a planner role — one engineer moved into planning two days a week — raised completion without any new hires.
A college. Engineers wrote excellent notes on work orders: "bearing noisy", "belt cracking". Nobody read them. The analyse step was missing, so the same pumps failed every summer. A weekly ten-minute review of follow-up notes turned these observations into planned repairs.
Match the activity to the stage of the cycle
- Ordering the belts and filters before the job is issued
- Assigning ten jobs to two engineers for Tuesday
- Writing the motor current reading on the work order
- Reviewing which pumps failed most often this year
Engineers spend much of each morning finding parts, keys and permits for planned jobs. Which stage of the cycle is weak?