This article discusses some of the activities to be followed in order when setting up a preventative maintenance plan:

Assets being physical objects degrade in performance over time and are susceptible to unexpected damage or failure. To ensure their continued and reliable operation, it is imperative to conduct preventative measures on the assets that you manage for your customers, also helping to eliminate downtime and undue asset damage costs.

A preventative maintenance plan is comprised of three key components:

Due to the fact that a maintenance plan is comprised of these separate components, you enjoy the ability to create standardised schedules applicable at one or many different locations, forcing consistency and assuredness in the work that will be performed.

Once a schedule has been applied to a location, thereby executing the maintenance plan, you can view the planned job events, per site or per asset, including the ability to move or skip each event as necessary.

PREREQUISITES

A few things you'll need at hand to help with setting up maintenance plans:

STEP 1 Go to the Settings tab and open Maintenance Schedule.

STEP 2 Define a new schedule to ensure that the required jobs are automatically created on the days you plan to action preventative maintenance for your customers.

STEP 3 Fill in the basic details with a suitable name and description. You can edit the automatically generated code if needed to easily identify this schedule in future.

STEP 4 Configure the frequency at which the planned jobs should be created, with the necessary tasks and assets corresponding to the specified asset types intact within the job.

You can configure the maintenance schedule to create jobs in the following two ways:

This mode will create one job with tasks for multiple assets at any location where the schedule is applied.
In the example below, the scheduled job created per location includes a task to be performed on two assets, both belonging to the asset type 'Lights' defined in the maintenance schedule configuration.

The jobs will be created automatically after the locations Maintenance Starts date. You can view the Maintenance Starts date on the location's profile (where the location can be site, building, room or floor).

This mode will create one job per asset at any location where the schedule is applied.

The example below shows two separate jobs created for the two assets of the predefined asset type called 'Airconditioner' installed at the location at which the preventative maintenance is scheduled.

The jobs will be created automatically after each asset's Maintenance Starts date. You can view the Maintenance Starts date on the asset's profile as shown in the example below:

By default, the Maintenance Starts date of an asset is considered to be the date when the asset was created, and the maintenance start date takes effect only when the location of that asset is already activated to run the maintenance schedule.

STEP 5 Once you click the Add schedule frequency, the Edit frequency screen opens up where you can specify the preferred mode of scheduling jobs and set the frequency for creating jobs either before, after or on a date defined per assigned location.

The three main sections on the Edit frequency screen are described below:

1. Name, Code and Description: Enter the basic details to clearly define the new scheduling frequency. The Code that you specify here will help you distinguish the frequency that is initiating the planned jobs. See the example below:

2. Create a job: Specify the mode in which the jobs will be created by the maintenance schedule. In this case, selecting Per location will create one job per location when you activate the maintenance schedule for all of the required locations.

3. Tasks and Asset Types: Add the tasks to be performed and associated assets types which require preventative maintenance on a regular basis. The tasks and the assets (of the specified asset type) in that location will be prefilled in the new jobs created by the maintenance schedule.

Once you have finished adding all of the tasks and the asset types, save the configuration.

Within this one maintenance schedule, you can add multiple schedule frequencies each aimed at creating jobs with different set of tasks on different asset types.

For example, we will create another schedule frequency to create planned job per asset.

Once the frequencies are added, the maintenance schedule is ready.

In the final step, you can set the guidelines for the maintenance schedule to follow when creating jobs, as discussed in the next section.

STEP 6 Specify when and in what way do you want the maintenance schedule to create the planned jobs.

If you choose to merge jobs using the Merge jobs scheduled for option, multiple jobs will be merged into one job if they occur within the specified merging window. This assists enormously with minimising unnecessary repeat visits to a location.

The maintenance schedule is now ready to be applied to appropriate locations.

STEP 7 On the MAINTENANCE SCHEDULE page, you will find the new maintenance schedule displayed in the list of all the available maintenance schedules.

To specify the locations where the new maintenance schedule will apply, just select the counter under the LOCATIONS column.

STEP 8 Choose the appropriate locations with the consideration that the assets present in those locations belong to the same asset types as specified in the Schedule frequencies section in the maintenance schedule.

NOTE: Assets are automatically added to any applicable schedules when they are created or modified, so even if there are no assets of a particular type at a location now, jobs will be created when they are added in future.

Once the locations are selected, the counter against the maintenance schedule will increment for every new geographic location (where the selected site/building/floor/room is located).

You can view more information about the summary of the participating assets in the location and also set the job details for the upcoming scheduled jobs right from under Job Options.

STEP 9 Activating is the final step to start receiving new jobs on the scheduled dates.

Option 1 You can activate the maintenance schedule on the location from the summary view:

Option 2 Or directly on the location:

Upon activation, you will find a new set of information on the maintenance schedule summary - a preview of all the job events created/to be created for the different frequency configurations in the maintenance schedule.

The series of job events provide you the flexibility to control the occurrence of a specific job event through the Move or Skip option on that event.

That completes the creation, configuration and setting up of maintenance schedules.

Now, as the new jobs are generated, you only have to set the appointment date and the jobs are ready to dispatch.