Planned Preventative Maintenance
Planned preventative maintenance (PPM) is a proactive approach to maintaining assets, equipment and building systems via scheduled, routine tasks, designed to prevent issues before they occur. Rather than waiting for faults (reactive maintenance), PPM uses maintenance schedules, based on manufacturer guidance, compliance requirements, asset age, condition and performance data (often from asset surveys) to keep assets operating safely, legally, reliably and efficiently.
The goal of PPM is to minimise unplanned downtime, reduce reactive remedial costs and extend the overall asset lifespan, playing a vital role in risk management by ensuring that systems critical to life safety, such as fire protection, HVAC, lifts and water hygiene, remain compliant, functional and safe at all times.
Effective PPM is powered by good quality data, and digital tools are essential to this. Organisations need to manage maintenance calendars, track work history, capture asset performance and optimise service intervals over time. This creates a more predictable, controlled and cost-effective maintenance regime compared to purely reactive approaches.
Asset surveys also play a central, foundational role here, providing the baseline data that PPM regimes rely on to function properly. Without accurate, up-to-date information about what assets exist, where they are, and what condition they're in, it's impossible to build a reliable maintenance plan. Asset surveying therefore acts as the necessary, but often overlooked starting point for designing and optimising PPM programmes.
