The Case for Evidence-Based PM Strategy Review

Planned maintenance programmes grow. This is not a design failure — it is a rational response to operational experience, regulatory requirements, OEM recommendations, and the prudent instinct to do more rather than less when consequences are high. The problem is that most organisations lack a systematic mechanism for the corresponding process of reduction: identifying where the programme has accumulated tasks that no longer deliver proportional reliability benefit.

A process PFMEA applied to the maintenance planning system itself — treating the process that produces maintenance plans as the process under review — is an effective methodology for finding these opportunities systematically. It identifies where the planning process structurally fails: where plans are set and never meaningfully reviewed, where OEM recommendations are applied without adjustment to actual operating conditions, where condition-based strategy changes accumulate informally outside the system, and where administrative tasks have become embedded in maintenance plans without clear asset linkage.

The output is not a list of tasks to remove. It is a prioritised set of hypotheses to test: specific observations about why the programme may be miscalibrated, specific data to pull from the management system to confirm or refute each hypothesis, and specific recommendations for what to do if the hypothesis is confirmed. This provides the engineering team with a defensible basis for plan modification that is grounded in evidence and amenable to reliability review — rather than a cost-reduction target handed down without analytical justification.

Across our engagements in energy and resources, the initial hypothesis is consistently confirmed: a material proportion of active maintenance plans have had no meaningful task-level change since creation, and a structured review supported by SAP data and field input from workgroup leaders consistently identifies significant opportunities to reduce effort without compromising asset integrity.