PM is the trade's abbreviation for planned recurring work, and a PM program is the schedule that produces it. The useful thing to be clear about is what a PM program does not cover, because sites that push everything into the PM queue lose the ability to see any of it. There are four kinds of maintenance work at almost every site, they behave completely differently, and keeping them in separate queues is what makes the numbers mean anything at all.
PM, and the three queues beside it
PM is recurring work that comes round on an interval. Corrective work is a specific fault, found or reported, that needs fixing once. Shutdown work is jobs that can only happen during a planned outage. Improvement work changes the asset rather than maintaining it. All four consume the same hours from the same people, which is exactly why they must be counted separately.
Why mixing them hides the problem
When a corrective job is logged as a PM, the PM completion figure looks healthy while planned work is actually being displaced by breakdowns, which is the single most important thing a maintenance manager needs to see. Sites in that position usually feel busy and cannot explain why the plan keeps slipping, and the answer is in a queue that was never separated.
The findings loop between them
A PM visit that finds a fault should create a corrective job, not extend the visit indefinitely. That loop is the main way a preventive programme pays for itself: it converts things that would have failed into scheduled work at a time you chose. Sites without the loop have technicians either fixing things ad hoc or not reporting them at all.
Questions people ask about pm programs for maintenance
What does PM stand for?
Preventive maintenance, sometimes written preventative. In some sites it is used loosely for all planned work; keeping it to recurring interval-driven work makes the queue counts meaningful.
Should a PM visit fix small faults it finds?
Usually yes if the fix is short and safe, and it should still be recorded as a finding. What breaks the programme is unrecorded work, because the visit then appears to have taken longer for no visible reason.
What is PM compliance?
The share of due PM work actually completed in its window. It is only meaningful when the queues are separate, and it means nothing if corrective work is being logged as PM.