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Work Management

What does risk-based maintenance planning mean in practice?

Every asset carries a criticality, and criticality sets the interval and the priority rather than the calendar or the loudest request. The result is that the work you defer is work you chose to defer, with the consequence written down.

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Risk-based planning means one thing on the floor: the order of the work is decided by consequence rather than by who asked last.

Every asset in the register carries a criticality, taken from what it actually carries rather than from what it cost. That rank then sets two things at once, the preventive interval and the priority of any order raised against it.

What it replaces

A maintenance team running 70% reactive is not a team with a staffing problem. It is a team without a planning function. The work arrives the same way either way. What changes is whether anyone decided the order.

Without a rank, the day is set by whatever broke overnight plus whatever somebody upstairs chased. Planned work slides because it can, and it slides again tomorrow. Nobody is being negligent. There is simply no mechanism that makes deferring a task cost anything to the person deferring it.

Where the intervals come from

Not the equipment manual. A manufacturer's interval is written for an average installation under average duty, and your building is neither.

Intervals and predictive triggers are built from criticality and condition, both of which live on the asset record. That is why this work cannot start before the register is true: a schedule derived from fields that are wrong is a schedule aimed at the wrong equipment, and it will look exactly like a working program.

What changes on the floor

Deferral stops being invisible. When an order is pushed, the rank says what is being accepted and the record says who accepted it. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why the ratio moves.

Orders also close on evidence rather than on a status field. A closed order proves somebody changed a dropdown; a reading, a finding and a part number prove what was done. Two years of the first gives a maintenance history that cannot support a single decision, not an interval, not a replacement, not a staffing case.

How long it takes

The planning function is standing inside a few weeks. The reactive-to-planned ratio takes two to three quarters, because it is limited by how fast the asset data becomes true rather than by anyone's intent.

In practice

What has to be true for it to work

Three conditions. Missing any one of them produces a schedule that looks like a program and behaves like a calendar.

  • A register that is trueCriticality and condition are fields on an asset record, so a schedule is only as aimed as the register it came from.
  • A consequence rank on every assetTaken off what the asset carries rather than what it cost, and applied to every asset rather than the ones somebody remembered.
  • Orders that close on evidenceThe reading, the finding, and the part, because next quarter's intervals are tuned against that record or against nothing.
50%Less unplanned downtime, across client portfolios
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