Planned maintenance
What is planned maintenance: planned maintenance explained
Planned maintenance is any maintenance work that is known about, prepared and resourced before it starts, whether the trigger is a routine interval or a fault that has already been found. The defining feature is advance notice and preparation, not the reason the work exists.
For field service
Know what the job needs before the van rolls
Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, lets the customer show you the fault first, so the engineer arrives with the right part or does not need to arrive at all.
That last point is what most definitions blur. Planned is a statement about timing and readiness. It is not a statement about whether the work is preventive.
What does planned maintenance mean?
A job qualifies as planned when four things are settled before anyone starts:
- Scope. What will be done, on which asset, and what "finished" looks like.
- Parts and materials. Identified, in stock or ordered, and reserved against the job.
- Labour and skills. The right trade, the right certification, the right number of people.
- Access and permits. The window, the isolation, the permit to work, and whoever needs to be told the asset is going down.
Everything that fails those tests is unplanned maintenance: reactive work that starts before it is prepared, usually because something has already stopped.
The European terminology standard for maintenance, EN 13306, is the reference most reliability teams fall back on when the vocabulary gets argued over. It is worth having on hand, because the words in this field are used loosely and the differences carry real operational weight.
Planned, scheduled, preventive: three different questions
These three get used interchangeably and they answer separate questions.
- Planned answers "is it prepared?" Scope, parts, labour and access are sorted.
- Scheduled answers "does it have a date?" A job can be fully planned and still sitting in a backlog waiting for a window.
- Preventive answers "why are we doing it?" The work exists to stop a failure rather than to repair one.
Preventive maintenance is a strategy: a decision about doing work before failure, on an interval or on condition, and it carries its own planning logic, intervals and failure modes. Treat it as a separate subject, and start from the preventive maintenance entry rather than this one for that side of it.
Planned maintenance is the wider bucket. Preventive work is nearly always planned, but so is a large share of corrective work. A pump fault found on a Tuesday inspection, parts ordered, and the repair booked into Saturday's window is corrective and fully planned. The failure has happened. The response was still prepared.
Planned maintenance example: the same repair, twice
A conveyor bearing shows rising vibration on a routine check. The team orders the bearing, books a two-hour Sunday window, briefs a fitter, and swaps it with the line already down for changeover. Corrective work, planned, and effectively free of production impact.
The same bearing on a different site runs to failure at eleven on a Thursday morning. The line stops, the part is not on the shelf, two people are pulled off other jobs, and the fix takes most of a shift. Identical repair, entirely different cost, and the only variable was advance notice.
Why the planned share is the number to watch
The cost of the work that was not planned is the argument for planning it. Siemens and Senseye's True Cost of Downtime 2022 report estimated that unplanned downtime costs Fortune Global 500 industrial companies around 1.5 trillion US dollars a year, roughly 11 percent of turnover, up from about 864 billion in the 2019 to 2020 research. The same report put the average large plant at around 25 hours of downtime a month.
Those are heavy-industry headline figures and they do not transfer to a small estate or a service desk. The mechanism does. Work done inside a prepared window costs less than the same work done at the moment of failure.
How is planned maintenance measured?
- Planned maintenance percentage. Planned maintenance hours divided by total maintenance hours. Widely used, and easy to inflate if a job counts as planned the morning it is done. Set a minimum notice period in the definition and hold to it.
- Schedule compliance. Of the work scheduled for the period, how much was actually completed in that period. This is the number that reveals whether the plan survives contact with the week.
- Backlog by state. Split ready-to-schedule from waiting-on-parts. A large backlog of prepared work is a scheduling problem. A large backlog of unprepared work is a planning problem.
- Reactive hours. The inverse view, and the one that tends to move first when planning improves.
What planned maintenance means for a support desk
Planned work is not only a maintenance department concern. Every planned window generates support volume: notifications before it, a predictable spike of tickets during and after it, and a set of contacts that are only explicable if the desk knows the window happened.
Two habits close most of that gap. Put maintenance windows on the service desk calendar so first line recognises the cause instead of investigating it, and treat completion evidence from the window as part of the record. That is the same discipline described in proof of work and proof of work in field service.
What planned maintenance is confused with
- Preventive maintenance. A strategy about acting before failure. Planned maintenance is about preparation, and covers corrective jobs too.
- Scheduled maintenance. Prepared and dated are different states. Plenty of planned work has no date yet.
- Predictive maintenance. Condition data deciding when to act. It feeds planned work, it is not the same thing.
- Deferred corrective maintenance. A known fault held back to a suitable moment. This is planned work, and it is often miscounted as reactive.
One caution on the planning itself. A window is only as good as the information it was built on, and a job planned from a phone description rather than a look at the asset arrives with the wrong parts often enough to matter. Seeing the condition first is the point of a pre-visit assessment, and it is the same economics that make an avoidable truck roll expensive.
