What’s a Good Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP)?

What Is Planned Maintenance Percentage?

Behind the phrase “if everything goes as planned,” there are a few important implications: One is that in an ideal world, everything does go as planned in order to meet the key objectives set by the original plan. The other is that plans don’t always work out perfectly, and there’s room for the unexpected to occur. 

These truths can play out in many contexts, including when it comes to maintenance work. When setting your maintenance strategy, you might schedule regular inspections of machinery, clean equipment daily and do other forms of preventive maintenance. 

Ideally, everything goes as planned, and your scheduled maintenance work minimizes the amount of reactive maintenance or emergency maintenance you need to perform as well as the associated equipment downtime. Realistically, though, there will almost always be some amount of unplanned maintenance.

To assess how your overall maintenance strategy is doing, a key performance indicator (KPI) to consider is your planned maintenance percentage. This measures the number of total maintenance hours that were spent on planned maintenance in a given timeframe. 

Typically, the higher the planned maintenance percentage, the more successful your overall preventive maintenance program because it means you’re preventing unplanned downtime or emergency situations that can be costly to fix. Read more on to learn how this crucial maintenance metric can help you streamline your maintenance operations and workflows.

What Is Planned Maintenance?

Planned maintenance activities encompass all scheduled, documented and preventive maintenance that’s meant to avoid breakdowns or any unplanned downtime. 

Sometimes, planned maintenance involves working on equipment during planned downtime, such as if you need to halt production on an assembly line to replace a belt. This is a more proactive maintenance approach in that you’ve built this downtime into your overall production schedule, and you’re changing the belt to avoid an unexpected breakdown that could lead to longer, costlier delays.

Planned maintenance also goes beyond basic scheduled maintenance in the sense that scheduled maintenance is more of a subset that refers to assigning a specific technician or staff member to do the maintenance work at a particular time. Meanwhile, planned maintenance is more holistic in terms of looking at how the work will be done and how it fits into your overall maintenance strategy and business goals. 

For example, a gym might have scheduled maintenance that involves staff wiping down equipment every two hours; whereas, planned maintenance might involve a strategy for inspecting treadmills during off-peak hours to minimize customer interruptions.  

How to Calculate Planned Maintenance Percentage

The calculation for planned maintenance percentage is straightforward. All you need to know is the total number of hours spent on all maintenance work over a given period and the total number of planned maintenance hours during that same period. 

To calculate the percentage, just divide the total number of planned maintenance hours for this period by the total number of maintenance hours, then multiply by 100. The formula is:

Planned maintenance hours ÷ total maintenance hours x 100 = Planned maintenance percentage

For example, if your company spent 60 hours in a given month on planned maintenance out of 80 total maintenance hours, dividing 60 by 80 equals 0.75; then multiply by 100, which equals 75 percent.

Benefits of a High PMP

A high planned maintenance percentage (PMP) implies that your company is planning maintenance properly, with minimal unexpected downtime. In contrast, a low PMP signals that your business is facing lots of unexpected equipment failures and possibly emergency repairs that can increase maintenance costs.

While a higher PMP is somewhat subjective, typically organizations with solid maintenance processes set a PMP goal of 85 percent or higher. But it’s not just about being theoretically “right” about how much maintenance is needed. There are potential tangible benefits to a high PMP, such as:

• Cost savings on maintenance: Planned maintenance can be more affordable than unplanned maintenance. For example, if you need to hire an HVAC technician on short notice to fix a malfunctioning system, then you could pay a surcharge for the emergency service, especially if it’s occurring outside normal business hours. But if you planned ahead, you might pay a lower cost for the HVAC inspection, and the technician also might spot issues that can be repaired for less than if you waited for a full breakdown to occur.
• Less unplanned equipment downtime: Planned maintenance also means that other staff can plan accordingly if something is known to be temporarily out of commission, and you also might prevent further issues from developing in the future. With less unplanned equipment downtime, you improve equipment reliability, which leads to better productivity overall.
• Improved asset longevity: Planned maintenance can also improve asset longevity, such as with regular cleanings and inspections that help equipment last longer. That can save time and money in the long run, compared with having to replace assets that fail sooner.
• Better compliance: Planned maintenance can also align better with a compliance strategy, like if a restaurant needs to pass a health inspection. These inspections are often random, so staying on top of maintenance issues can help you avoid inspectors identifying unsafe conditions, thereby resulting in issues like fines or temporary closures.

Use-Case Example

What do the benefits of a high PMP look like in practicality? Suppose a beverage manufacturer up its PMP from 80 to 90 percent by scheduling more frequent inspections of bottling and packaging equipment. Although there could be an increase in initial costs, like hiring an additional member for your maintenance department to perform these additional inspections, that 10 percent PMP improvement could mean saving dozens of hours per year on unplanned equipment downtime.

As such, the company could avoid production delays that prevent it from fulfilling customer orders on time. If the company did want to still meet demand during this downtime, it might incur even higher costs (compared to hiring an employee for additional planned maintenance) to contract out that manufacturing to another facility, or it might simply miss deliveries, leading to a loss of near-term revenue and a loss of customer trust that diminishes long-term revenue. Plus, repairing bottling equipment due to issues like grease buildups, which could have been avoided with scheduled cleanings, adds cost.

6 Ways to Improve PMP

To improve your PMP, there are several steps you can take, including:

1. Create maintenance plans for individual assets: In order to create a successful overarching planned maintenance strategy, you first need to figure out what each individual asset needs. Perhaps dedicating more time than you currently are to inspecting certain pieces of equipment leads to more uptime for that asset, thereby boosting your overall PMP.
2. Provide proper technician training: Making sure your maintenance technicians are up to speed on what work needs to be done can improve the efficacy of your planned maintenance and reduce unexpected downtime.
3. Develop or improve preventive maintenance schedule: Sometimes, you need to up your preventive maintenance in order to avoid bigger issues down the line. Consider reviewing equipment manufacturer recommendations to ensure you’re setting a schedule aligned with best practices.
4. Implement a maintenance software: Using computerized maintenance management system software (CMMS software) like Coast can help your maintenance team stay on top of maintenance tasks. That can help you identify weak points in your strategy while also ensuring that your planned maintenance tasks are being completed as intended.
5. Consider predictive maintenance and condition-monitoring tools: In addition to preventive maintenance, implementing a predictive maintenance strategy and condition-monitoring tools that can help clue you in early when an asset is starting to fail can then enable you to schedule planned maintenance, rather than waiting for a full, more disruptive breakdown.
6. Improve documentation and review processes: Lastly, improving your documentation and review processes for all maintenance issues can help make planned maintenance more efficient and reduce the need for unplanned maintenance. For example, having clear documentation of when assets were last inspected can help staff ensure they’re following the right plan, rather than missing important dates.