A factory's maintenance plan is negotiated with production every week, and that negotiation is the actual job. The tasks themselves are rarely contentious. What is contentious is when the line can be stopped, for how long, and what gets done in that window, and a plan that does not account for it is overridden rather than followed.
Running work and stopped work
The first sort in factory maintenance is which tasks can be done with the line running and which cannot. Running work can be scheduled freely and should be, because it is the part of the plan that never competes for the asset. Stopped work has to be grouped into windows, and grouping is where a planner adds most value: pulling tasks slightly early so they fall into a window that is happening anyway costs almost nothing and saves a negotiation. Industrial preventive maintenance is mostly this arithmetic.
What the software has to model
Factory maintenance software and manufacturing maintenance software need to express that a task requires a shutdown, and to let a planner assemble a window's list from what is due or nearly due. Products that only produce a flat due list leave the grouping to a spreadsheet, which is where most planners actually do it, and that spreadsheet then becomes the real plan while the system holds a version nobody follows. Ask to see a shutdown assembled, not a due list displayed.
Infrastructure is the part that gets forgotten
Infrastructure maintenance, meaning compressed air, steam, water, drainage, electrical distribution and the building itself, supports every machine and belongs to none of them. It is consistently under-planned because no production owner is measured on it, and its failures stop everything rather than one line. Giving infrastructure its own place in the plan, with its own intervals and its own owner, is one of the higher-return changes available in a factory, and costs nothing but the decision.
Questions people ask about factory maintenance
How is factory maintenance scheduled?
By sorting tasks into what can be done running and what needs the line stopped, then grouping the stopped work into shutdown windows, pulling tasks slightly early to fill windows already happening.
What should factory maintenance software model?
That a task requires a shutdown, and the assembly of a window's list from what is due or nearly due. Without that, the real plan lives in a planner's spreadsheet.
Why is infrastructure maintenance neglected?
Because no production owner is measured on it. Compressed air, steam, water and electrical distribution support every machine and belong to none, and their failures stop everything.