Plant maintenance software has a constraint that building and facilities maintenance does not: the machine you need to work on is making something, and stopping it costs more than the job. Everything about how a factory schedules maintenance follows from that. Intervals get planned around shutdowns rather than around dates, criticality decides what gets a spare and what does not, and the argument for preventive work is made in production hours rather than in labour. This page is about the version of maintenance management that has to negotiate with a production plan.
Schedule to shutdowns, and treat them as scarce
A planned shutdown is the only cheap window a factory has, and it is always shorter than the work available. That makes shutdown planning the real scheduling problem: which jobs must be done in the window, which can be done running, and which have been waiting three shutdowns and are now a risk.
Criticality is what makes the register useful
Not every asset deserves the same attention. Ranking by what stops if it fails, how long a replacement takes and whether there is a spare turns a flat list into a plan, and it is the analysis that justifies both the schedule and the stores.
Price the argument in production, but measure what you control
On the worked example this site publishes, the labour difference alone between reactive and planned work is $9,273.60 a month. That is the defensible number. The production loss on top is real and much larger, and it belongs to the people who know the margin and the order book.
The found field is worth most on a line
A bearing noted as running warm at a Tuesday check is a planned change at the weekend shutdown instead of an unplanned stop on Thursday. That single sequence is the entire business case for preventive maintenance in a factory, and it depends on somebody writing down something that had not failed yet.
Questions people ask about plant maintenance software
How does this differ from facilities maintenance?
The constraint. A building's plant can usually be stopped at night; a line cannot be stopped at all without a cost, so the scheduling is negotiated rather than chosen.
Do we need condition monitoring?
Sometimes, and it is a separate purchase from a CMMS. Vibration and thermal monitoring earn their keep on high-criticality rotating plant and are hard to justify on the rest.
What about spare parts?
Also a separate problem, and a real one on a line. A CMMS tells you what needs doing; a stores system tells you whether you can do it, and pretending one is the other leads to a schedule that stalls at the parts counter.