Every plant we visit has a preventive maintenance plan. It lives in a laminated sheet or an Excel file, it was made with real care — and last quarter perhaps 40% of it actually happened. The gap between plan and execution is not laziness. It is design.
Rule 1: Tasks, not titles
"Monthly maintenance — Compressor" is not executable. "Drain condensate, check belt tension, clean intake filter, record hours" is. A PM without a checklist becomes whatever the technician had time for.
Rule 2: Run-hours for machines that run unevenly
A compressor doing double shifts in season and idling off-season should not be serviced monthly — it should be serviced every 250 run-hours. Calendar PM over-services idle machines and under-services busy ones. A simple hour-meter reading once a day is enough.
Rule 3: Overdue must be louder than due
A plan where overdue PMs sit silently in a spreadsheet column will decay. Overdue items must escalate — to the maintenance head after 2 days, visibly, automatically. What gets escalated gets done.
Rule 4: Kit before the job
Half of PM non-compliance is logistics: the fitter reached the machine and the grease, filter or belt was not there. List the materials on the schedule; stores kits them the day before. The PM becomes a 40-minute job instead of a 3-trip afternoon.
Rule 5: One KPI — on-time %, per machine, per month
Not "PMs done" (easy to inflate by doing easy ones) — PMs done on time as a percentage of due. Review it monthly, machine-wise. When a machine's breakdowns rise, its PM compliance history usually tells you why.
None of these rules require software — a disciplined plant can run them on paper. What software changes is the cost of the discipline: AssetAI generates the work orders when due, escalates the overdue ones, prints checklists with materials, and computes on-time % — so the discipline runs on rails instead of on memory.