Maintenance guides for small and mid-size plants

Plain-English answers to the questions maintenance teams ask when they plan preventive maintenance, manage work orders and look for a CMMS.

• CMMS for small manufacturing plants: what you actually need
  A plain-English guide to choosing a CMMS for a small or mid-size plant: the few features that matter, what to skip, and how to avoid a long implementation project.
• Preventive maintenance schedule template: what to include
  What a good preventive maintenance schedule contains, with an example layout (machine, task, frequency, trade, duration) and how to keep it running week after week.
• From Excel to a CMMS: how to move your maintenance spreadsheets
  How to move from Excel maintenance spreadsheets to a CMMS without retyping everything: what to prepare, what to clean up, and how to check the result.
• CMMS vs spreadsheets for maintenance planning
  An honest comparison of a CMMS and Excel spreadsheets for maintenance planning: where spreadsheets are fine, where they fail, and when to switch.
• Work order management for maintenance teams: the basics
  What a maintenance work order is, what it should contain, how it differs from a preventive maintenance task, and how to keep one-time jobs from getting lost.
• Preventive vs reactive maintenance: how to balance both
  The difference between preventive and reactive maintenance, why most plants need both, and a simple way to shift time from firefighting to planned work.
• Weekly maintenance planning: a simple method that works
  A simple weekly method for planning preventive maintenance and work orders: what to look at, how to compare demand with your team's hours, and how to avoid overloaded weeks.
• Maintenance KPIs for small plants: the few that matter
  The handful of maintenance KPIs a small plant should track: overdue preventive tasks, completion rate, open work orders and workload against capacity, and how to read them.