What is planned preventative maintenance (PPM)?
6 min read
Planned preventative maintenance, usually shortened to PPM, means servicing equipment on a fixed schedule rather than waiting for it to fail. A boiler serviced every six months whether or not anything is wrong is on a PPM schedule; a boiler repaired when it stops working is reactive maintenance. Most buildings need both, and the ratio between them is a reasonable measure of how well a building is being managed.
Planned versus reactive
Reactive maintenance is cheaper per visit and far more expensive per year. A failure happens at the least convenient moment, out of hours, with no parts on hand, and often takes something else with it. A lift that fails in an occupied building is not only a repair cost; it is a building that cannot be fully used until it is fixed.
Planned maintenance costs more in visits that appear to find nothing wrong. That is the point of it. The visit that finds nothing wrong is the one that prevented the failure.
What drives the schedule
A PPM schedule is built from the assets themselves. Each asset carries a service interval — monthly for a passenger lift, six-monthly for a gas boiler, annually for a flat roof inspection — and the schedule is what those intervals produce when laid across a year.
This is why an asset register is the prerequisite for planned maintenance rather than an optional extra. Without a list of what is in the building, there is nothing to schedule from, and the maintenance plan becomes whatever the previous contractor happened to do.
Statutory maintenance is not optional PPM
Some planned maintenance is a legal requirement rather than good practice. Fire risk assessments, gas safety checks, electrical installation condition reports, legionella risk assessments, asbestos management, lift examinations and portable appliance testing all sit on statutory intervals, and the consequence of missing one is not a breakdown but a breach.
These are worth separating from discretionary PPM in any system that tracks them, because the response to a missed statutory date is different from the response to a missed service.
Where the money actually goes
The visible cost of maintaining a building is the annual service spend. The larger cost is replacement: the plant that reaches the end of its life and has to be renewed. A twenty-year capital forecast usually dwarfs the annual PPM budget.
An expected lifespan is a starting point rather than a prediction. A boiler with a nominal fifteen-year life in a well-run plant room may run for twenty-five; the same boiler run hard and serviced late may fail at ten. Any forecast built from nominal lifespans should say clearly that it is nominal, and should be adjusted by the condition somebody has actually observed.
How Pinnqle handles it
Pinnqle builds the maintenance plan from the asset register. Assets can be added from a library of two hundred and ninety types across eighteen categories, each arriving with a default service interval and a nominal life, or imported from the spreadsheet an outgoing contractor handed over. Where the spreadsheet is silent on an interval, the library supplies one.
The register shows what is overdue, what is due this month, and — separately — what has no service interval recorded at all, because on a newly populated estate that last group is usually the largest and hiding it would make the plan look finished when it is not.
Common questions
What does PPM stand for in facilities management?
PPM stands for planned preventative maintenance. It describes servicing carried out on a predetermined schedule to prevent failure, as opposed to reactive maintenance, which is carried out after something has broken.
How often should building assets be serviced?
Service intervals vary by asset type. Passenger lifts are commonly serviced monthly, gas boilers every six to twelve months, fire alarm systems quarterly, and emergency lighting monthly with an annual full-duration test. Statutory items such as gas safety checks and electrical installation condition reports have intervals set by regulation rather than by preference.
What is the difference between PPM and reactive maintenance?
Planned preventative maintenance is scheduled in advance and carried out whether or not a fault is present. Reactive maintenance responds to a fault that has already occurred. Reactive work is cheaper per visit and more expensive per year, because failures happen at inconvenient times and often damage other components.
Pinnqle does this end to end.
Estimating through to handover, and the building after it. Five plans, fourteen-day free trial on every one.