How to create a maintenance schedule for your workshop equipment

By Pavan Jheeta

Even the best workshop equipment needs a little TLC.

But with so much equipment and so many variables, it’s not easy to keep your entire inventory in top condition.

That’s why smart workshops take their planning seriously — with an equipment maintenance schedule to help them reduce breakdowns and save their teams time.

Here’s how to get started with creating your own maintenance schedule:

 

1. Choose the timing

Before you jump into an equipment maintenance schedule, you need to know what’s most important:

  • Planning maintenance by time.
  • Or planning maintenance by usage.

There’s no universal answer that’s best for every workshop (or every type of equipment). Each one has their own benefits and difficulties — and you might need a different approach for different types of kit.

Time-based maintenance is a simple schedule based on the calendar. It could be a fixed interval — like weekly or monthly — or it could be an interval based on when the last maintenance happened.

Usage-based maintenance involves measuring specific metrics. That could mean the number of operations (like how many times a vehicle lift has raised a vehicle) — or something more detailed (like the number of rotations on a wheel balancer).

So why would you choose one approach over the other?

Time-based maintenance is simple to plan — and simple to stick to. But it can lead to excessive (or inadequate) maintenance.

If you’re doing weekly maintenance on a vehicle lift that only gets used once a week, you’re performing maintenance after every use. It’s a waste of time (and money!).

Usage-based maintenance gives you a schedule that more closely matches the condition of the equipment. But it’s a lot more complicated, and you’ll need a way to measure the usage itself.

 

2. Prioritise your equipment

Every piece of equipment in your workshop needs some level of maintenance.

But their needs aren’t the same — and neither are the consequences.

So to make the most of the time you have (and minimise your breakdowns and disruption), you can give each piece of equipment a priority score.

It’s called the Risk Priority Number (RPN). Here’s how it works:

For each piece of equipment, you give it a numerical ranking based on 3 different factors:

  • The severity of a failure (how bad it would be for your business)
  • The occurrence rate (how likely a failure is)
  • And the detection rate (how likely your teams are to notice a problem).

With these 3 numbers (usually on a scale of 1 to 10), you can then multiply them to get the Risk Priority Number for that equipment:

RPN=Severity × Occurrence × Detection

With an RPN for every piece of equipment, you can then list your equipment in order of their urgency — so you can get started on creating a maintenance schedule for the most important bits of kit first.

 

3. Set detailed instructions

A good maintenance schedule isn’t just about ‘when’:

It’s also about ‘who’ and ‘how’.

For each piece of equipment that needs maintenance, you can create a step-by-step checklist that your teams can follow — so you can guarantee consistency and confidence in the results.

That could mean using a dedicated piece of software that’s designed for equipment maintenance. But for lots of workshops (especially ones with a smaller inventory of equipment), a simple spreadsheet will do the same job.

 

4. Monitor and improve

Every workshop needs a maintenance schedule. It’s an essential part of minimising breakdowns and saving your business time and money on repairs.

But your schedule itself needs maintenance, too.

Without an assessment of your maintenance practices, you might be under-maintaining or over-maintaining your equipment. Your team might be wasting time — or putting your equipment at risk.

So once you’ve got a new maintenance schedule in place, you’ll need to revisit it every once in a while and assess how well it’s doing.

And for that, there are a few useful metrics that are easy to calculate:

  • Your Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)
  • Your Planned Maintenance Percentage (PMP)
  • And your Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percent (SMCP).

Here’s what each of them means (and how to calculate them):

Mean Time Between Failure is the average time between breakdowns of your equipment. As your maintenance schedule improves, this number should keep climbing higher — to show that your equipment is lasting longer before it suffers from a failure.

MTBF = (Hours in operation)/(Number of failures)

Planned Maintenance Percentage is a measure of how long you’re spending on planned maintenance — against how long you’re spending on all maintenance (both planned and reactive).

It’s a helpful way of seeing how effective your preventative maintenance schedule is. As your maintenance schedule improves, you should see this number increasing — to show that you’re reducing the amount of reactive maintenance compared to preventative maintenance.

PMP=( (Planned maintenance hours)/(Total maintenance hours) ) ×100

Schedule Maintenance Critical Percent is a measure of how late a maintenance task is compared to its maintenance cycle. It’s useful for seeing which tasks are falling behind, and how badly they’re overdue.

As your schedule improves, this number should be getting lower — to show that your teams are keeping up with their maintenance tasks.

SMCP= ( (Days late+Days in a cycle)/(Days in a cycle) ) ×100

 

Need an easier way to stay up to date?

Creating the right maintenance schedule is no easy task — especially as your workshop keeps growing and you add new equipment.

That’s why more workshops are taking advantage of dedicated services that take the strain away — like our Afterkare Service for lifting and testing equipment.

With regular inspections and expert maintenance, we can help you make sure you’re equipment’s up to scratch — helping to minimise breakdowns, stay compliant, and extend the lifespan of your workshop equipment to get more from your investments.

You can look through our different aftercare service levels to find the package that’s right for you — or talk directly to a maintenance expert to find exactly what your workshop needs.