Almost any organization with equipment or machinery will develop a planned maintenance schedule. This document lays out when you will service specific parts of the machine and how often. The hope is that planning maintenance will help avoid catastrophic failures and costly repairs. But, what percentage of scheduled maintenance is truly critical? Is it possible to go too far in preventive care, resulting in wasting time and money? That’s where Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percentage (SMCP) comes in.
What Counts as Scheduled Maintenance?
The term scheduled maintenance refers to any task that you assign to a technician with a deadline. This includes both recurring tasks that repeat on the schedule at set intervals, as well as one-time tasks. Some of these tasks include inspections, equipment adjustments, regular servicing, and lubrication. For example, scheduled maintenance may be replacing a conveyor belt bearing every 30 days or inspecting a motor every 90 days. Alternatively, when you identify an issue with an asset or component and create a one-time work order, that is also scheduled maintenance.
Reducing reactive maintenance, equipment failures, and maintenance backlogs are the primary goals of scheduled maintenance. Regular inspections extend the life of assets and reduce the need for repairs and replacements. Additionally, scheduling tasks helps you allocate resources more effectively and efficiently.
The Difference Between Scheduled Maintenance and Planned Maintenance
You may often hear people use planned maintenance and scheduled maintenance interchangeably, but they are different things.
Performing planned maintenance involves anticipating maintenance work and developing a plan to complete it. The process includes all aspects of identifying tasks, materials and workflows, prioritizing work, and analyzing completed work. As far as the many types of maintenance, planned maintenance can be reactive, preventive, condition-based, or predictive. Planned maintenance means addressing a situation systematically, whether it be running a lightbulb until it fails or lubricating a motor twice a week.
Choosing when and who should complete planned maintenance tasks is scheduled maintenance. So, scheduled maintenance is actually a step in your planned maintenance process. Planned maintenance becomes scheduled when you give it a due date and assign it to a technician.
What is Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percentage?
Because we don’t live in a perfect world where everything goes according to plan and is done on time, sometimes maintenance is overdue. Maintenance managers then face the challenge of choosing which duties to prioritize and which can wait. The scheduled maintenance critical percentage measures the effect of late planned maintenance tasks.
SMCP provides you with a tool to help prioritize your recurring scheduled maintenance tasks. When several preventive maintenance tasks (PMs) are overdue, calculating SMCP enables you to choose which PMs to do first. The calculation compares the time overdue to the recurring frequency of the PM. The larger the percentage, the more important that PM should be.
How to Calculate Your SMCP
To calculate the SMCP of a task, use this equation:
Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percentage = (# of days late + # of days in the PM cycle) ÷ # of days in the PM cycle x 100
Benefits of Measuring Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percentage
Better Planning and Scheduling
You can schedule work orders more efficiently if you are aware of which ones will have the biggest effect on your facilities. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) can track SMCP and help you prioritize these jobs. With SMCP data at your fingertips, you can easily rearrange the maintenance schedule to put tasks with a high SMCP higher on the to-do list.
Reduce Reactive Maintenance
When you set a PM to recur frequently, there is a higher likelihood of missing multiple PM cycles. As you miss more PM cycles, that asset is increasingly vulnerable to unexpected failure. SMCP helps you keep your PMs on track and prevent equipment breakdown, which reduces reactive maintenance.
Smoother Audits
Maintenance that isn’t done on time might result in compliance problems or failed audits. Monitoring SMCP keeps your maintenance backlog on your radar and draws attention to critical activities for health and safety. Also, it is possible to identify tasks that are routinely late and take action to address the underlying issues.
Optimize Preventive Maintenance with SMCP
Neglecting maintenance can cost your facility money and production. To reduce these expenditures and make better use of the available resources, calculate your scheduled maintenance critical percentage. You can eliminate inefficiencies and lost productivity by focusing on the most crucial tasks and truly optimizing your maintenance plan.
