A preventive maintenance plan gets written twice at most sites: once, thoroughly, at the start, and then never again, because the document was built to be admired rather than maintained. The version that survives is shorter than the first attempt and has six parts. Everything else that usually goes in, the photographs, the equipment manuals, the org chart, belongs somewhere it can be updated separately without anybody having to reopen the plan.
The six parts
The asset list with an identifier per item. The interval on each, with a one-line reason. What a visit consists of, per asset type. Who does it, as a role rather than a name. What happens when something fails a check. And where the completed record goes. Six parts, each a table or a short paragraph, and a plan of that shape can be revised in twenty minutes rather than being rewritten.
The part everyone leaves out
What happens when a check fails. Without it, a technician who finds something wrong has no defined path, so it becomes a verbal report that may or may not survive the walk back. Writing down where a failed check goes, who decides on it and how urgent counts as urgent turns findings into work instead of into anecdotes.
Names age, roles do not
Write roles rather than names throughout, and the plan survives staffing changes without becoming visibly out of date. A plan that names people who have left is read as unmaintained, and once a document is read that way people stop consulting it, which is a worse outcome than the wrong name. One more thing belongs in the document and is almost always missing: the date it was last reviewed, and by whom. A plan with no review date cannot be told apart from an abandoned one, and the people who most need to trust it are the ones least able to check.
Questions people ask about preventive maintenance plan
How long should a preventive maintenance plan be?
Short enough that somebody will revise it. The asset list can be long; the surrounding document should be a handful of pages, because it is the part nobody updates when it is thirty.
Should the plan include costs?
Costing the plan is useful and belongs beside it rather than inside it, because costs change on a different clock from intervals. A planner that works the figures from your unit count and rates is the cheaper way to keep that current.
How often should the plan be reviewed?
Once a year, and after any failure the plan should have caught. The second trigger is worth more than the first, because it is the moment you have specific evidence about which interval was wrong.