Preventive Maintenance Checklist: What to Watch For

Preventive maintenance means servicing equipment on a planned schedule before a failure occurs. A poorly designed preventive maintenance plan either wastes time and materials with unnecessarily frequent service, or leaves gaps too wide and leads to unexpected breakdowns. This article covers what to watch for when building a preventive maintenance checklist.

1. Choose the right trigger: date or counter?

For some equipment, a date-based interval like “every 3 months” is enough. But for heavily used machines (multi-shift production, seasonal peaks), a date-based interval can be misleading — what actually matters is run hours or output. Counter-based triggering reflects real wear more accurately than a calendar date.

2. Standardize the checklist

Using a different checklist every time for the same equipment type leads to skipped steps. Define a fixed template per equipment type (e.g. “monthly CNC maintenance”) — which parts to inspect, and which lubrication/cleaning steps to perform, should be decided in advance.

3. Build in an early warning

Opening a work order when preventive maintenance is due isn’t enough — the people responsible need advance notice as the target date/counter approaches, so material and staff planning doesn’t get left to the last minute. This lets you use the procurement lead time as a buffer before the work order opens.

4. Prevent duplicate work orders

In manually tracked systems, opening more than one work order for the same preventive maintenance is a common mistake. A preventive maintenance plan should not open a new work order if one is already open for the same target; on closure, the next target should be recalculated automatically.

5. Record material consumption

Recording the oil, filters, belts and similar materials used during preventive maintenance against the work order keeps stock levels accurate and makes maintenance cost realistic. We covered how maintenance cost is calculated in our maintenance cost article.

Preventive maintenance in bakimo

In bakimo, preventive maintenance can be triggered by date or by machine counter (run hours, output); once the target threshold is reached the system opens a work order automatically, prevents duplicates, and sends an early warning notification. See details on our Features page.

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