Preventive maintenance plan generator (Excel CMMS)
List your equipment and its recurring tasks and the generator schedules every job across your horizon, calculating the next due dates and workload. CMMS-style Excel export.
Preventive maintenance avoids costly breakdowns, but every recurring task still has to be scheduled. This generator turns your equipment inventory into a maintenance plan: frequencies, next due dates, work schedule and forecast workload.
How the plan is generated
For each task, you enter the equipment, criticality, frequency (in days, weeks or months) and duration. The generator projects every occurrence across your chosen horizon.
If a last-completed date is provided, the next due date is calculated from that date; otherwise the plan starts on the start date.
Criticality (critical, important, secondary) ranks the jobs: a chiller or a critical compressor comes before a comfort asset. You can weight it the way an FMEA does, by combining how often the failure occurs, how severe the stoppage is and how easily it is detected.
The dashboard adds up the number of jobs, the total workload in hours and the split by criticality. If you log breakdowns and downtime alongside, you can calculate MTBF (mean time between failures), MTTR (mean time to repair) and availability, which equals MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR).
Use cases
- Workshops and production lines
- HVAC, refrigeration units and building services equipment
- Machinery, plant and rolling stock
- Tracking regulatory inspections and periodic checks
- Facility management and maintenance across several sites
- Small and mid-sized manufacturers starting preventive maintenance without software
Frequently asked questions
What is a CMMS in Excel?
A simplified CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) in Excel centralizes your equipment inventory, preventive tasks and their schedule. It's enough for a moderately sized fleet of assets.
What's the difference between preventive and corrective maintenance?
Preventive anticipates (servicing planned at regular intervals); corrective steps in after the breakdown. A solid preventive plan sharply reduces corrective work.
What are MTBF and MTTR?
MTBF (mean time between failures) is cumulated uptime divided by the number of failures: it measures reliability. MTTR (mean time to repair) is total downtime divided by the number of jobs: it measures how fast the asset is back in service. The higher the MTBF and the lower the MTTR, the more available the equipment.
How do I calculate availability?
Availability equals MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR). An asset with an MTBF of 400 hours and an MTTR of 4 hours scores 400 / 404, about 99 percent. Tracking that figure month after month shows whether the preventive plan is paying off.
How often are statutory inspections due?
Frequencies come from national safety rules, not from the maintenance plan. In the UK, LOLER thorough examinations fall every 6 months for equipment that lifts people and every 12 months for other lifting equipment, PUWER inspections follow the risk assessment, and fixed electrical installations in commercial premises are typically tested every 5 years. Whatever your jurisdiction, enter those dates as recurring jobs so they never slip.
How do I prioritise with criticality?
Rate each asset by the impact of a stoppage: critical (production halted or a safety risk), important (disruptive but workable), secondary (comfort). Jobs on critical assets are scheduled first and never pushed back — that is FMEA ranking applied to a maintenance plan.
How many pieces of equipment can I manage?
The spreadsheet works well for a few dozen assets. Beyond that, and with several technicians, a dedicated CMMS software becomes more comfortable.