You’ve just taken over a building. The previous FM team left behind a folder of handwritten job cards, a spreadsheet that hasn’t been updated in eight months, and a maintenance log that basically says “checked — OK” for every asset, every month, for the past three years. The chillers haven’t been serviced since commissioning. Nobody knows when the generator was last load-tested. And the first thing your client asks is: “Can you send me the PPM schedule?”
This scenario plays out on building takeovers everywhere. The PPM programme exists on paper but doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening on site — or it doesn’t exist at all. Either way, you’re starting from scratch, and you need to build something that actually works.
A proper PPM programme — Planned Preventive Maintenance — is the difference between a building that runs smoothly and one that’s constantly in reactive mode. This guide takes you through the full process of building one from the ground up: from the asset register to the task schedule, frequency-setting, documentation, and the KPIs that tell you whether it’s working. Every step is practical, every piece of advice comes from real FM experience.
What Is a PPM Programme and Why Does It Matter?
PPM stands for Planned Preventive Maintenance. It’s a structured programme of scheduled maintenance tasks carried out on building assets at defined intervals — before failures occur, not after them. The opposite of PPM is reactive maintenance: waiting for something to break, then fixing it.
Most buildings run a mix of both. The question is the ratio. A well-run FM operation targets reactive maintenance at less than 20–30% of total maintenance activity. When reactive work dominates — when the majority of your team’s time is spent responding to faults — it’s a clear signal that the PPM programme is either missing or not working.
Why PPM matters: it’s not just about preventing breakdowns. A structured PPM programme extends asset life, maintains statutory compliance (Legionella, fire systems, electrical), provides documented evidence of maintenance for client audits, and keeps your team in control rather than constantly firefighting. Buildings with strong PPM programmes cost less to run over time — equipment lasts longer, energy efficiency is maintained, and emergency callouts are rare.
Step 1: Build Your Asset Register — Before Anything Else
This is the step most FM teams rush or skip entirely. A PPM programme is only as good as the asset register that drives it. If your asset register is incomplete, your PPM schedule will have gaps. If it’s inaccurate, your technicians will be doing maintenance tasks on equipment that doesn’t exist while missing equipment that does.
Walk every part of the building — every plant room, every riser, every roof level, every basement — and record every maintainable asset. This is not a job you can do from drawings alone. As-built drawings and site reality are almost always different, especially in buildings that have been modified or refurbished.
For each asset, record:
• Asset tag number — a unique identifier that ties the physical asset to the record in your system
• Asset description — type, make, model, and serial number
• Location — building, floor, room, and grid reference if large site
• Capacity / rating — kW, kVA, litres, CFM — whatever is relevant to the asset type
• Installation date — or estimated age if not known
• Condition rating — 1 (new/excellent) to 5 (end of life/poor) at time of survey
• Last known service date — from records if available, or unknown
• Warranty status — in warranty, out of warranty, or unknown
On a medium-sized commercial building (5,000–10,000 m²), a thorough asset survey takes 2–3 days for a two-person team. Don’t rush it — the quality of your PPM programme depends entirely on the quality of what you record at this stage.
| 📌 Tool: Use the PPM Planner tool on mepmasterguide.com to build and organise your asset register and maintenance schedule. |
Step 2: Identify Your Statutory and Mandatory Maintenance
Before you decide how often to service the air handling units, you need to know what you’re legally required to maintain and at what frequency. These are non-negotiable — they’re not in the PPM programme because someone decided they were a good idea, they’re there because a regulation, a standard, or a contract requires them.
Statutory maintenance requirements vary by country and building type, but in most commercial buildings the core mandatory tasks are:
| System | Statutory Requirement | Typical Frequency |
| Legionella / water systems | Risk assessment, temperature monitoring, flushing of low-use outlets, microbiological sampling | Weekly flushing, monthly temperature logging, quarterly sampling |
| Fire alarm system | Testing, inspection, and maintenance to relevant standard (BS 5839 UK, NFPA 72 US) | Weekly test, quarterly inspection, annual service |
| Emergency lighting | Function test and annual duration test (3-hour minimum) | Monthly function test, annual duration test |
| Electrical installation | Periodic inspection and testing (EICR) to wiring regulations | Every 5 years for commercial (or as risk assessment dictates) |
| Fixed gas systems | Gas safety inspection and certification | Annual — Gas Safe registered engineer (UK) |
| Pressure systems | Inspection under Written Scheme of Examination | Per scheme — typically 12–26 months depending on system |
| Lifts and escalators | LOLER inspection — thorough examination by competent person | Every 6 months (passenger carrying lifts) |
| Fire suppression systems | Inspection and testing to relevant standard | Quarterly inspection, annual full service |
These statutory tasks form the non-negotiable backbone of your PPM programme. Everything else — manufacturer-recommended maintenance, SFG20 tasks, good practice intervals — sits on top of this foundation. Never negotiate away statutory tasks when you’re under budget pressure.
Step 3: Set Maintenance Frequencies — The Right Way
Once you know what needs maintaining, you need to decide how often. This is where most PPM programmes go wrong — either copying generic frequencies from a template without thinking about the specific building, or setting frequencies based on budget rather than risk.
The right frequency for any maintenance task is driven by three factors: the manufacturer’s recommendation, the consequence of failure, and the environment the asset operates in. A chiller in a hospital operating 24/7 needs more frequent maintenance than the same model in an office building running 8 hours a day. A fire alarm in a care home needs more frequent testing than one in a low-risk storage facility.
Use this hierarchy to set frequencies:
1. Statutory minimum — if there’s a legal frequency, that’s the floor. You cannot go below it
2. Manufacturer recommendation — the manufacturer knows the equipment. Their service intervals are a starting point, not a ceiling
3. Consequence of failure — high consequence (safety-critical, business-critical, no standby) = shorter interval. Low consequence (non-critical, has standby) = can extend
4. Operating environment — harsh environment (heat, dust, humidity, chemical atmosphere) = shorter interval. Clean, controlled environment = can extend
5. Historical performance — if a piece of equipment repeatedly fails between services, the interval is too long. Adjust based on actual experience
The most common mistake: setting all assets to the same frequency (“quarterly for everything”) to make the schedule easy to manage. This leads to over-maintenance of low-risk assets (wasting budget) and under-maintenance of high-risk ones (causing failures). Differentiate by risk.
Step 4: Write the Task Specifications
A PPM task is not just a line in a schedule that says “Service AHU.” That instruction is meaningless to a technician who hasn’t done it before. A properly written PPM task specification tells the technician exactly what to do, what to check, what tools and PPE to use, and what the acceptance standards are.
The difference between “Service AHU” and a proper task specification:
| Weak task (don’t use this) | Proper task specification (use this) |
| Service AHU — monthly | Inspect pre-filter ΔP: replace if >250 Pa or visibly blocked. Flush condensate drain: confirm drains within 30 seconds. Listen for fan bearing noise. Check BMS for active alarms. Log findings. |
| Check generator | Simulate mains failure via AMF test switch. Confirm auto-start within 10 seconds. Run under building load for 30 minutes minimum. Record voltage (all 3 phases), frequency, coolant temp, oil pressure. Return to auto. Log. |
| Inspect electrical panels | Visual check of all panel doors — closed, sealed, no smell, no visible damage. Check for tripped breakers. Record any defects and raise work order. No panel opening at this visit. |
SFG20 — the industry standard for maintenance task specifications used widely in the UK and internationally — provides pre-written task specifications for over 70,000 maintenance activities across all building systems. If you have access to SFG20, use it as the basis for your task specifications rather than writing them from scratch. If not, base your specifications on manufacturer service documentation and your team’s site experience.
Step 5: Build the Schedule and Assign Resources
You have your asset register, your frequencies, and your task specifications. Now you need to build the actual schedule — which tasks happen in which week, which month, which quarter — and assign them to the right people.
Start by calculating your total PPM hours. For each asset, estimate the time required for each maintenance visit. Multiply by the annual frequency. Sum across all assets. This gives you the total maintenance man-hours required per year.
Compare this against your available resource. If the numbers don’t add up — and they often don’t on the first pass — you have three options: add resource, reduce frequency on lower-risk assets, or outsource specialist tasks to reduce the burden on your in-house team. Be realistic about what your team can actually achieve.
Practical scheduling rules:
• Spread the load evenly across the year — avoid concentrating all annual services in the same month
• Coordinate shutdowns with building operations — major plant shutdowns need advance notice to the client and affected occupants
• Cluster tasks on the same asset — if an asset needs monthly, quarterly, and annual tasks, do the monthly and quarterly tasks together when the quarterly falls due, rather than two separate visits
• Allow contingency time — 15–20% of scheduled time should be held back for reactive maintenance, emergency responses, and overruns. A PPM programme that fills 100% of available time falls apart the first week something unexpected happens
• Build in float for statutory tasks — never schedule statutory tasks on the last possible day. Build in 2–4 weeks of float so a rescheduled visit doesn’t push you out of compliance
| 📌 Tool: Use the PPM Checklist Generator to build system-specific maintenance checklists for your programme. |
Step 6: Set Up Your Documentation and Record-Keeping
A PPM task that was completed but not recorded is, from a compliance and liability perspective, a task that didn’t happen. Documentation is not optional — it’s the evidence that proves your programme is running.
At minimum, every PPM task record must capture:
• Asset tag number and description
• Date and time of the visit
• Name of the technician who carried out the work
• Tasks completed — with readings and measurements, not just ‘checked OK’
• Any defects found — description, severity, and work order raised
• Parts replaced — part number, quantity, cost
• Next due date confirmed
• Technician signature and supervisor counter-signature for high-risk tasks
Paper records work, but they’re hard to manage at scale and easy to lose. If your organisation uses a CMMS (Computerised Maintenance Management System) — see the CAFM vs CMMS Guide — all of this is captured digitally against the asset record. This makes compliance reporting, audit preparation, and KPI tracking significantly easier.
Step 7: Measure, Review, and Improve
A PPM programme is not a document you write once and file. It’s a living programme that needs to be measured, reviewed, and adjusted based on what’s actually happening on site.
The key metrics to track monthly:
• PPM completion rate — tasks completed on time as a percentage of tasks scheduled. Target: ≥95%. Anything below 85% means the programme is not running as planned
• Reactive-to-planned ratio — reactive jobs as a percentage of total maintenance activity. Target: <25%. Rising reactive work is an early warning that PPM is slipping
• Overdue tasks — any task not completed within the scheduled month. Zero tolerance for statutory tasks; less than 5% acceptable for non-statutory
• Defects found during PPM — the number of faults identified during planned maintenance visits. A rising defect rate isn’t bad — it means your PPM is finding problems before they become failures
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) by asset — for critical assets, tracking how long between failures tells you whether your maintenance frequency is right
Review the programme formally every 6 months in the first year, then annually once it’s established. Ask: which assets are failing between services (frequency too low)? Which tasks are never finding defects (frequency too high, or wrong task)? Has anything changed in the building that makes the programme outdated?
| 📌 For the KPIs that measure your PPM programme’s performance, see the FM KPIs Guide. |
The Most Common PPM Programme Mistakes — and How to Avoid Them
Copying a generic PPM template without validating it against the actual site. A template is a starting point. It becomes your PPM programme only after you’ve walked the building, identified every asset, confirmed the frequencies are appropriate for the specific equipment and environment, and validated the task specifications against the manufacturer’s requirements.
No asset register — just a list of tasks. A PPM schedule without an asset register has no reference point. You can’t track asset history, can’t identify repeat failures, can’t plan asset replacement, and can’t demonstrate compliance against a specific piece of equipment.
Setting frequencies based on budget rather than risk. When budget pressure arrives, the instinct is to extend maintenance intervals. On low-risk assets, this is acceptable. On safety-critical or business-critical assets, it’s a false economy — the cost of the failure will far exceed the saving.
No feedback loop from the maintenance team. The people carrying out the tasks know what’s actually happening on site. If a task specification is wrong, they know. If a frequency is too short or too long, they know. Build a mechanism for your technicians to flag issues with the programme — and act on the feedback.
Treating the PPM completion rate as the only metric. A 98% PPM completion rate looks great until you discover that half the tasks were completed in two minutes and logged as ‘OK’ without any actual inspection. Completion rate tells you tasks are being done. Defect finding rate tells you they’re being done properly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to build a PPM programme from scratch?
For a medium-sized commercial building (5,000–10,000 m²), building a PPM programme from scratch takes approximately 4–8 weeks if done properly. The asset survey takes 2–3 days. Defining statutory requirements and setting frequencies takes 3–5 days. Writing task specifications takes 1–2 weeks depending on the number of asset types. Building the schedule and uploading it into a CMMS takes another week. Allow additional time for review, approval, and team training before going live. Rushing this process produces a programme that looks complete but doesn’t work.
What is SFG20 and should I use it for my PPM programme?
SFG20 is a database of standardised maintenance task specifications covering over 70,000 activities across all building services — HVAC, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, lifts, and more. It’s widely used in the UK and internationally as the reference standard for defining what PPM tasks should involve and at what frequency. SFG20 tasks are kept up to date with regulatory changes, so using it significantly reduces the risk of your PPM programme becoming outdated. It requires a subscription, but for a commercial FM operation it’s one of the most cost-effective investments you can make in your maintenance programme quality.
What is the difference between PPM and planned maintenance?
PPM (Planned Preventive Maintenance) and planned maintenance are often used interchangeably, but there is a distinction. Planned maintenance is any maintenance that is scheduled in advance — including planned replacements, planned reactive repairs, and planned refurbishment works. PPM specifically refers to maintenance carried out at defined intervals to prevent failure — before a problem occurs. All PPM is planned maintenance, but not all planned maintenance is PPM. For example, replacing a chiller that has reached end of life is planned maintenance but not PPM.
How do I know if my PPM frequencies are correct?
The best evidence that your frequencies are correct is your defect-finding rate and your reactive maintenance rate. If you’re consistently finding defects during PPM visits (equipment deteriorating between services), your frequency may be too low for that asset. If PPM visits are consistently finding everything in perfect condition with no deterioration, the frequency may be too high. Compare against manufacturer service recommendations as a baseline, then adjust based on actual site performance over 12–24 months. Assets that fail repeatedly between services need shorter intervals — regardless of what the manufacturer’s manual says.
Can I run a PPM programme without a CMMS?
Yes — many FM teams run effective PPM programmes using spreadsheets, paper records, and shared drives. The limitations become apparent as the programme grows: tracking completion, managing records, generating reports, and trending asset performance all become progressively harder to manage manually. A CMMS becomes genuinely valuable — rather than just convenient — when you have more than 200–300 assets, more than one building, or a contractual requirement to provide detailed maintenance records to a client. For smaller operations, a well-structured spreadsheet with a consistent record-keeping process can work effectively.
Conclusion
A PPM programme built properly — on a complete asset register, driven by risk-based frequencies, with clear task specifications and consistent records — transforms how a building is managed. The reactive calls reduce. The compliance evidence is always available. The client relationship improves because you’re demonstrating control rather than responding to crises.
