Are Your Preventive Maintenance Best Practices Actually Working?

Compared to most maintenance teams, your preventive maintenance strategy looks solid. Preventive maintenance tasks are scheduled. Work orders exist. Checklists have been created. It seems your preventive maintenance best practices are in place.

But on the floor, it’s a different story. Breakdowns still happen. Emergency work still crowds out planned work. And despite doing “all the right things,” equipment reliability hasn’t improved the way you expected.

That’s because preventive maintenance (PM) doesn’t usually fail at the planning stage. It fails quietly in execution. For instance, we’ve seen customers perform the same amount of preventive maintenance work across all their machines, regardless of maintenance history or usage metrics. This quickly leads to under- or over-maintaining, depending on the individual asset’s needs and manufacturer recommendations.

This article isn’t another guide on how to build a preventive maintenance program. You already did that. It’s a self-audit designed to help you test whether your preventive maintenance best practices are actually working — or just existing on paper. If any of the situations below sound familiar, your PM program may be broken — even if it checks every box on a spreadsheet.

How to Use This Preventive Maintenance Best Practices Self-Audit

Read each section carefully. If you catch yourself nodding or thinking, “Yeah, that happens here,” treat it as a warning sign.

One red flag doesn’t mean your entire PM program is doomed. But the more boxes you check, the more likely your best practices exist in theory — not in day-to-day execution.

1. If PMs Exist but Still Get Skipped, Your Scheduling Best Practice Is Broken

You technically have a preventive maintenance schedule. PMs show up on a calendar. But somehow, they still don’t always get done.

Red flags include:

• PMs listed as “due this week” with no clear owner
• PMs getting pushed when reactive work pops up
• Missed PMs that only surface after equipment fails

When PMs are optional under pressure, your schedule isn’t a system — it’s a suggestion. Preventive maintenance only works when it’s visible, owned and unavoidable.

In many shops, skipped PMs don’t trigger alarms. They disappear quietly until the next breakdown forces attention.

High-performing teams don’t rely on memory or goodwill. They use systems that assign ownership, surface missed work immediately and make PM slippage impossible to ignore.

2. If PM Quality Depends on Who Does the Work, Your Standardization Best Practice Is Broken

The same PM task should produce the same result — no matter who performs it. If that’s not happening, standardization has failed.

Red flags include:

• Different maintenance personnel performing the same PM in different ways
• Experienced techs skipping steps “they already know”
• Inconsistent findings between shifts or sites

This is how institutional knowledge quietly takes over. One tech checks vibration. Another listens for noise. A third replaces parts proactively. All three mark the PM complete.

In manufacturing, this often shows up on critical assets. One shift documents signs of wear and tension on a conveyor belt. Another just verifies the motor runs. The PM gets completed every time — yet failures keep happening.

Without standardized preventive maintenance checklists, you don’t have PM best practices. You have personal habits.The strongest PM programs embed expectations directly into the work itself, so every technician follows the same critical steps — without relying on experience or guesswork.

3. If PMs Are Completed but Nothing Improves, Your Feedback Loop Is Broken

This is one of the most dangerous failure modes because it looks like success. PMs are getting done. Work orders are closed. But the same assets keep failing.

Red flags include:

• PMs marked complete with little or no detail
• Repeated failures on assets with regular PMs
• PM findings that never lead to task changes

Preventive maintenance should evolve. If PMs never change, they eventually lose relevance.

A bearing that fails twice in six months should trigger deeper inspection steps, different lubrication intervals or design changes. Strong PM programs treat every completed PM as feedback, not just a box to check.

4. If PM Knowledge Lives in People’s Heads, Your PM Program Is Fragile

Ask yourself a simple question: What happens to PM quality if one key technician is out for two weeks?

If the answer makes you nervous, your preventive maintenance best practices aren’t documented — they’re borrowed.

Red flags include:

• “Only one person really knows this machine”
• New hires taking months to feel confident with PMs
• PM execution stalling when certain techs are unavailable

In multi-site facility and property maintenance teams, this is a common breaking point. One long-tenured tech knows the quirks of an aging boiler or air handler. When they’re out, PMs still get done — but critical equipment checks are missed.

This kind of fragility doesn’t show up in reports. It shows up during vacations, sick days, retirements and turnover.

The most resilient maintenance teams turn experience into process. They capture what a good PM looks like and make it repeatable, so performance doesn’t depend on who’s on shift.

5. If PMs Are Hard to Execute in the Field, Compliance Will Always Suffer

Even well-designed PMs fail when execution is inconvenient.

Red flags include:

• PMs that require going back to the office to complete
• Notes written on paper and logged later (or never)
• Photos and findings that rarely make it into records

Every extra step adds friction. Over time, technicians start cutting corners — not because they don’t care, but because the maintenance processes get in the way of finishing work.

Preventive maintenance best practices must fit how work actually happens: in the field, on the floor and often under time pressure. Teams that improve PM compliance remove friction instead of blaming people.

6. If You Can’t Prove PM Work Was Done, Accountability Is Broken

If leadership asks, “Was this PM actually done?” and the answer is unclear, accountability has failed.

Red flags include:

• PMs marked complete with no evidence
• No clear record of who did what and when
• Audits that require chasing paperwork or emails

Without an audit trail, PM completion becomes a trust exercise. That’s risky — especially in regulated environments or during incident investigations.

Strong preventive maintenance programs automate accountability. Completion isn’t just claimed; it’s documented.

What Broken Preventive Maintenance Best Practices Cost You

When preventive maintenance best practices break down, the cost rarely shows up all at once. It accumulates quietly across downtime, labor hours and repeated breakdowns that feel unavoidable.

Teams often assume the issue is effort — not the system. But in reality, broken PM execution erodes reliability in predictable ways:

• Unplanned downtime increases because potential issues aren’t identified early enough
• Breakdowns repeat on the same assets despite having a preventive maintenance program in place
• Maintenance technicians spend more time reacting instead of executing a proactive maintenance plan
• Maintenance planning becomes guesswork, driven by urgency rather than data

Over time, this creates a vicious cycle. PMs get deprioritized because they don’t appear to prevent failures. Failures increase because PMs aren’t executed consistently. The result is a PM program that exists — but doesn’t optimize equipment performance or asset life.

High-performing teams break this cycle by treating preventive maintenance as an operational system, not a static checklist. They track key performance indicators like PM completion rates, downtime trends and recurring failure modes to continuously optimize how their PM program works.

Why Manual Systems Hide These Problems

Spreadsheets, whiteboards and paper-based maintenance plans don’t usually fail loudly. They fail quietly.

Manual systems make it difficult to connect PM work to real outcomes like reduced downtime or fewer breakdowns. Missed PMs blend in. Incomplete work orders look finished. Potential issues stay buried in handwritten notes or disconnected files.

Without a centralized preventive maintenance program, maintenance planning becomes reactive. Teams struggle to optimize schedules, identify recurring issues or understand which PM tasks actually prevent failures.

That’s why many organizations believe their preventive maintenance best practices are working — until unplanned downtime proves otherwise. Manual systems hide gaps instead of exposing them.

How High-Performing Teams Fix Broken Preventive Maintenance Best Practices

Teams with strong PM outcomes don’t rely on discipline alone. They rely on systems that support maintenance technicians and facility managers with real-time visibility and structure.

Instead of managing PMs through disconnected tools, they centralize their preventive maintenance program around a single source of truth: preventive maintenance software, also known as a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). Assets, PM schedules, work orders and historical data all live in one place.

This allows teams to:

• Optimize maintenance planning based on asset performance and failure history
• Identify potential issues before they turn into breakdowns
• Track key performance indicators tied to downtime and PM compliance
• Continuously improve the PM program instead of running it on autopilot

A CMMS like Coast supports these workflows by design, helping teams turn preventive maintenance best practices into daily habits — not reminders that get ignored when work piles up.

Case in point: Coast Customer Lisa Bosworth, head of quality and continuous improvement for Solmet Group, says implementing our CMMS completely transformed their PM process. “We’ve been able to optimize our maintenance scheduling and decrease downtime with this more comprehensive preventive maintenance strategy,” she says. “Because the PMs are more in-depth now, we’re catching things before they’re happening.”

A Deeper Self-Audit: Where Preventive Maintenance Best Practices Commonly Break

To fully audit preventive maintenance best practices, you need to look beyond schedules and ask how your maintenance plan holds up across real maintenance activities.

Start with your most critical pieces of equipment. Are maintenance tasks like inspections, lubrication, calibration and routine oil changes performed based on actual operating conditions, or are they copied forward year after year?

If your preventive maintenance plan doesn’t adapt to usage, environment or asset age, it won’t prevent equipment failures — it will just document them.

If You’re Still Fighting Downtime, Your PM Strategy Isn’t Optimized

Chronic downtime is one of the clearest signals that a preventive maintenance program isn’t working. Teams often respond by adding more PMs, but that rarely helps.

High-performing teams focus on how to optimize their PM program by:

• Eliminating low-value maintenance tasks
• Shifting away from run-to-failure assets where uptime matters
• Using real-time data to reduce repeat breakdowns

This is where many teams get stuck between reactive maintenance, preventive maintenance and more advanced strategies like predictive maintenance or condition-based maintenance. Without a system to track trends, the strategy never evolves.

If Work Orders Don’t Tell the Full Story, You’re Missing Risk

Your PM work orders should surface potential issues, not just confirm that work happened.

If work orders lack detail, photos, readings or notes, maintenance technicians can’t flag early warning signs tied to declining equipment performance. Over time, this leads to shorter mean time between failures and declining uptime.

A modern CMMS allows teams to capture this information in real time, connect it to assets and review it during maintenance planning.

If Your PM Program Can’t Be Measured, It Can’t Be Improved

A PM program without metrics is impossible to manage. Preventive maintenance best practices rely on tracking KPIs and key performance indicators such as:

• PM completion rates
• Downtime trends
• Equipment uptime
• Repeat failure frequency

If your preventive maintenance schedule exists but you can’t tie it to these outcomes, it’s not protecting the bottom line. High-performing teams regularly review these metrics to streamline upkeep activities and adjust their preventive maintenance program before small issues become costly failures.

Preventive Maintenance Only Works When the System Does

Having PMs isn’t the goal. Reliable execution is. If this self-audit surfaced gaps in your preventive maintenance best practices, the issue isn’t effort — it’s whether your systems support modern maintenance procedures and planning.

Teams that outperform don’t rely on memory, spreadsheets or disconnected tools. They use a CMMS to support maintenance technicians, manage work orders and continuously improve their PM program.

That’s how preventive maintenance shifts from a static checklist to a living system that protects uptime, expands asset lifespan and reduces overall maintenance costs.

Sign up for a free Coast account to see what preventive maintenance best practices look like when the system actually works.