What is maintenance planning?

The core of maintenance planning is defining maintenance tasks and determining the necessary resources to complete them. A well-structured maintenance plan helps organizations minimize unplanned downtime, optimize resources and extend the lifespans of their most important assets.

Maintenance planning is one of the building blocks of modern maintenance management: the processes and resources organizations rely on to maintain physical assets. Today, most enterprises rely on CMMS to automate and enhance their maintenance operations.

Most modern maintenance planning strategies incorporate a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to automate and enhance core maintenance operations. CMMS platforms are software solutions that document activity and improve workflows.

According to a recent report, the global CMMS market is expected to reach USD 1.54 billion this year. Furthermore, it is expected to grow to USD 2.67 billion by 2032, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.6%.

CMMS tools can store information about maintenance history, spare parts, job plans and preventive maintenance programs in a centralized system that’s easily accessible to maintenance planners. CMMS platforms help track key aspects of maintenance plans, including:

• Equipment failures
• Previous work orders
• Maintenance history
• Manufacturer information
• Spare-parts requirements
• Preventive maintenance schedules
• Labor hours
• Recurring maintenance tasks

CMMS tools also help maintenance departments keep a backlog of tasks in a digital format instead of in spreadsheets, paper forms and informal communications. When integrated with modern condition-monitoring (CM) tools, CMMS platforms enable preventive and predictive maintenance programs to flourish.

Maintenance planning and maintenance scheduling are closely related but serve two different purposes:

• Maintenance planning determines what actions need to be performed and how.
• Maintenance scheduling determines the ideal time to perform them to minimally impact business processes.

Maintenance planning and scheduling are often deployed together to help create a structured workflow for comprehensive maintenance operations. When supported by accurate maintenance data, historical data and a CMMS, the two practices improve equipment reliability and support broader enterprise asset management (EAM) objectives.

The maintenance planning process varies by organization and industry but typically centers around six established principles. The six maintenance planning principles span industries and have been in practice for decades. These established practices have helped enterprises of all sizes create effective maintenance strategies for their assets.

Here’s a closer look at each one:

1. Plan before scheduling: All maintenance plans must establish the scope, resources, procedures and requirements necessary to complete a job. Work shouldn’t begin without a clear plan and timetable in place. It should always be done in a way that is safe and as non-disruptive to core business operations as possible. 
2. Prioritize worker safety: Job plans—sets of instructions for completing specific maintenance tasks—should clearly identify all potential hazards maintenance workers are likely to face when performing a job. The plans should also list any required equipment or procedures necessary to complete the task. For example, on certain jobs, lockout-tagout (LOTO)—the placing of locks and tags on equipment and devices to indicate they should not be operated—might be necessary before work can begin.
3. Prepare in advance: Before embarking on a maintenance task or workflow, technicians and operators should take steps to ensure that they have the right resources in place to finish their work. It’s the responsibility of maintenance planners to determine which technicians, tools, spare parts, equipment and documentation are required for a job.
4. Create accurate estimates: Time estimates help maintenance schedulers determine how much work can realistically fit into a daily schedule. Over time, these estimates can be refined by using historical data from completed work orders and insights or notes left by the technicians.
5. Standardize recurring work: Recurring maintenance tasks should be standardized by using job plans. Standardization is a key component of maintenance planning. It helps improve consistency and reduces the resources and effort required to complete work orders.
6. Learn from completed work: Maintenance planning will improve only over time if teams learn from every job. By recording labor hours, materials and equipment failure information for each maintenance task they perform, they create a valuable backlog of information that can improve workflows in the future.

In maintenance planning, maintenance data provides the information maintenance teams need to make better decisions about what work to perform and how to perform it. Historical data from work orders, inspections, equipment failures and maintenance records help planners identify recurring problems and accurately estimate the time it will take to fix them.

Today, new technologies make far more maintenance data available than in the past. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, edge computing and real-time condition-monitoring (CM) allow organizations to collect detailed data about asset health and operating conditions in real time.

Modern CMMS platforms can then combine asset and work-order data with real-time sensor information to help teams track key metrics. Some key metric examples include mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), equipment availability, downtime and schedule compliance.

Maintenance data also supports continuous improvement, the ongoing process of refining job plans and resource allocation to create stronger maintenance strategies.

Effective maintenance planning produces many benefits at the enterprise level. Here are some of the most popular:

• Less unplanned downtime: One of the primary objectives of any maintenance program is to reduce unplanned downtime, which can cost companies as much as USD 600 billion annually, according to a 2026 Splunk/Oxford Economics study. Strong maintenance planning helps reduce equipment failures, which are the primary cause of unplanned downtime by enabling maintenance teams to identify and resolve equipment problems earlier.

• Improved equipment reliability: Maintenance planning helps make the assets organizations rely on for their core business processes more reliable by ensuring maintenance tasks are properly defined and consistently performed. Planners use historical data to identify the causes of recurring equipment failures and determine which maintenance strategies will be most effective.

• Increased operational efficiency: Maintenance planning can help reduce time wasted searching for parts, instructions and personnel. When technicians use a strong maintenance plan as part of their process, more of their time is spent performing maintenance, rather than searching for the right tool. This process can improve operational efficiency and increase wrench time without increasing staffing levels.

• Lower maintenance costs: Maintenance planning contributes to cost savings by reducing the number of emergency repairs that reactive maintenance teams must perform. Emergency repairs are expensive because they involve overtime, extra shipping costs and rework. Reactive maintenance is often outdated and doesn’t use the latest tools and technologies available.

• More accurate maintenance KPIs: Maintenance planning enables maintenance managers to determine whether their maintenance program is successful by tracking a series of key performance indicators (KPIs), including:
  • Schedule compliance
  • Planned maintenance percentage
  • Preventive maintenance compliance
  • MTTR
  • MTBF
  • Equipment availability
  • Equipment downtime

Strong maintenance plans should begin with a clear understanding of each asset your organization is responsible for and what kinds of work and resources are needed to keep those assets operational.

Here’s the typical process organizations rely on to create maintenance plans.  

Start by identifying each asset that requires maintenance and assessing what needs to be done to keep it performing at peak levels.

During this step, maintenance planners should review equipment and historical data—including previous work orders and known failure modes—to determine which maintenance tasks are most important.

Next, determine what kinds of work will need to be done and identify the technicians who are best suited to perform it.

During this step, it’s important to consider the skill level of technicians and the tools and spare parts needed to complete a job. Step two should also lay out any required safety procedures, permits, LOTO procedures and estimated labor time that will also go into the job.

A recurring job plan is a standardized set of instructions and resource requirements that can be reused whenever a maintenance job needs to be repeated regularly. Creating job plans for recurring work is a key step in optimizing processes and ensuring teams have the right parts and resources needed to complete jobs.

The plans should be created in a way that makes them easy to update as teams gain experience and find better ways to complete their work.

Not every maintenance job is equally urgent. Maintenance plans should prioritize work according to asset criticality, safety, production requirements and the potential consequences of equipment failure.

Once a job has been planned, it can either enter the backlog or be incorporated into a daily schedule according to its priority level.

CMMS tools help maintenance teams move away from outdated reactive maintenance strategies toward more modern, proactive ones.

When technicians regularly record the results of maintenance tasks, such as labor hours, parts used, failure codes and equipment condition, it helps a CMMS automate manual tasks and make more accurate predictions.

Maintenance planning is used across all industries that rely on physical assets for core business processes. Its use cases vary considerably—a manufacturing plant might focus on equipment availability while a healthcare facility might concentrate more on patient safety and regulatory compliance.

Here’s a look at how five industries use maintenance planning on their assets:

• Manufacturing: Manufacturers rely on maintenance planning to keep production equipment operating reliably and minimize unplanned downtime—key components of industrial asset management (IAM). Planners in the manufacturing industry often use CMMS tools and preventive and predictive maintenance strategies to maintain complex assets like industrial robots, conveyors and machinery around demanding production schedules.

• Energy and utilities: Organizations in the energy and utilities sector frequently rely on geographically distributed assets like pipelines, wind turbines and power lines for their core business processes. Maintenance planning helps coordinate inspections and repairs of these assets. It also ensures that the spare parts needed to restore them are always in stock and that the right technicians are available to perform the work.

• Transportation and logistics: Airlines, railways and shipping companies use maintenance planning to keep vehicles and infrastructure performing at top levels. Maintenance planners create detailed job plans that consider spare parts inventory and technician resources as well as rigorous operating schedules. Effective maintenance planning for transportation and logistics companies helps reduce the number and severity of breakdowns and contributes to stronger transportation networks worldwide.

• Healthcare: Hospitals and other healthcare organizations depend on medical equipment and building infrastructure to support patient care. Maintenance planning helps coordinate preventive maintenance for assets like imaging equipment, patient monitoring devices, HVAC systems and other critical infrastructure while also meeting demanding regulatory requirements.

• Facilities and infrastructure: Facilities teams use maintenance planning to manage building systems and infrastructure like elevators, electrical systems and plumbing that keep buildings safe and comfortable. Planning helps coordinate recurring maintenance, inspections and repairs while balancing asset condition, occupant need, available resources and operating budgets.

• Oil, gas and mining: Oil, gas and mining companies depend on large, complex assets that are often located in remote, physically demanding environments like deserts, mountains and oceans. Maintenance planning helps these organizations prepare their work in advance and use CM tools and predictive maintenance strategies to identify potential failures before they disrupt operations.