Reviewing and optimising the preventive maintenance schedule

Maintenance strategy · Industrial practice · Updated 2026-06-01

A preventive maintenance review systematically challenges the existing PM schedule, removing tasks that add no value, adjusting intervals to match real failure behaviour, and adding tasks where gaps exist. It cures the common problem of a PM programme that has grown by accretion into a mix of over-maintenance and missed risks.

What it is

Over time a PM schedule accumulates tasks added after incidents, copied from manuals or inherited without question, and intervals that were guessed rather than derived. A PM review examines each task for whether it addresses a real failure mode, whether its interval is justified, and whether it can be done by condition monitoring instead — pruning, re-intervalling and re-targeting the programme so maintenance effort matches actual need.

Why it is done

An unreviewed PM programme tends to two opposite faults at once: too much intrusive maintenance on items that do not need it, which wastes labour and can even induce failures, and too little attention to items that do. Reviewing it recovers wasted maintenance hours, reduces the risk of maintenance-induced defects from unnecessary intervention, and closes the gaps where genuine failure modes are unaddressed.

How it is done

The existing PM tasks are listed and each is challenged against the failure mode it is meant to prevent and the consequence of that failure. Tasks that address no credible mode are removed, intervals are adjusted toward the equipment's real failure behaviour and run hours, and intrusive time-based tasks are replaced by condition-based checks where a measurable warning exists. The revised programme is loaded into the maintenance system and re-reviewed periodically as failure data accumulates.

1. List existing PM tasks
2. Challenge each task's purpose
3. Remove valueless tasks
4. Re-set intervals to risk
5. Shift to condition-based
6. Reload and re-review

What to watch for

Cutting tasks purely to save labour, without checking the failure modes they cover, can remove a control that mattered. Over-maintaining by leaving every inherited task in place is the opposite error, and reviewing once then letting the schedule ossify again returns it to the same bloated state.

Related practices

Related topics

Preventive Maintenance · Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) · RCM (Reliability-Centred Maintenance)

Common in: Chemicals · Power Generation · Food Processing · Paper & Packaging · Cement

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