Planned maintenance percentage, counted properly

Planned maintenance percentage is planned hours as a share of all maintenance hours. Count hours, never jobs. One breakdown can eat a week and forty small planned jobs can take an afternoon, so a count of jobs will tell you the opposite of the truth.

What counts as planned

Planned means the job was known about, scoped and resourced before the day it happened. That is a wider definition than "preventive".

• •Preventive and statutory work on the schedule: planned
• •A repair found during an inspection, scoped and scheduled for next week: planned
• •A repair found during an inspection and done immediately because the crew was there: not planned, though it is a good outcome
• •A callout: not planned
• •A shutdown job on the shutdown list: planned

The number to aim at

Around 70 to 80 percent of hours planned is the figure most reliability practitioners quote as healthy. Treat it as a direction rather than a target, because the right level depends heavily on what you maintain. A building with old plant and no capital budget will not reach it, and beating itself up about that helps nobody.

The trend beats the level

Six months of movement tells you whether the programme is working. A single figure tells you almost nothing, especially in a month with one big failure.

Where the number goes wrong

• •Hours not recorded on reactive work, which inflates the planned share
• •Callouts written up as preventive jobs afterwards to tidy the record
• •Contractor hours excluded, which usually removes a large slice of the planned work
• •Standing time and travel dumped into whichever job is open at the time

What actually moves it

Not exhortation. Protected time for planned work that reactive work is not allowed to touch, and attacking the small number of assets generating most of the callouts. Those two changes move this number, and almost nothing else does.