Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM): The Complete Guide for UK Facilities Managers

Planned preventative maintenance (PPM) is the scheduled servicing, inspection and testing of a building's assets so that they keep working, stay safe and remain compliant with UK law. Done well, it is the single biggest lever a facilities manager has over reactive spend.

Why PPM matters more on a multi-site estate

A single hotel can absorb an occasional boiler failure. Fifty hotels cannot: each unplanned call-out means an out-of-hours engineer, lost trading and a compliance gap. Across an estate, PPM turns hundreds of potential emergencies into a predictable calendar of visits that can be routed, batched and priced in advance.

In our own data, sites that move from ad-hoc servicing to a structured PPM programme typically see reactive call-outs fall year on year, because root causes are found during servicing rather than at 11 pm on a Saturday.

What a PPM programme must include

Statutory tasks (non-negotiable)

• Commercial gas safety — annual inspection and certification of catering (CP42) and heating (CP17) installations by a Gas Safe registered engineer.
• F-Gas leak checks — 3-, 6- or 12-monthly depending on the refrigerant charge in CO₂-equivalent tonnes.
• Legionella control — monthly temperature monitoring, quarterly showerhead cleaning and a two-yearly (or on-change) risk assessment under ACoP L8.
• Electrical — fixed wire testing (EICR) every five years for most commercial premises, plus monthly emergency-lighting function tests and an annual three-hour duration test.
• Fire systems — quarterly or six-monthly servicing of fire alarm systems to BS 5839, annual extinguisher servicing and regular fire door inspections.
• Lifts and pressure systems — six-monthly LOLER thorough examinations for passenger lifts; written schemes of examination for pressure systems.

Asset-preserving tasks

Filter changes, belt tensioning, coil cleaning, drain jetting, roof and gutter clearance, door closer adjustment. None of these are legally mandated, but each one prevents a more expensive failure.

Using SFG20 to set frequencies

SFG20 is the UK's recognised standard for building maintenance specifications. It gives every asset type a set of tasks with a frequency and a criticality rating (statutory, mandatory, function-critical, discretionary). Aligning your PPM schedule to SFG20 does two things: it stops you over-maintaining low-risk assets, and it gives you a defensible answer when an auditor asks why a task is done at a particular interval.

Building the schedule

1. Capture the asset register. Every maintainable asset, tagged and located to floor and room. Without this, PPM is guesswork.
2. Assign tasks and frequencies. Start from statutory requirements, then apply SFG20 for the rest.
3. Load into a CAFM system. Frequencies become calendar events; certificates attach to the asset; expiry dates trigger reminders.
4. Route and batch. Group visits by site cluster and trade so one engineer completes several tasks per visit.
5. Record evidence at the point of work. Photos, readings and certificates uploaded on site — not typed up a week later.
6. Review quarterly. Which assets keep generating reactive jobs? Adjust frequency or plan replacement.

PPM and the reactive budget

Track the ratio of planned to reactive spend per site. A healthy hard-services estate runs at roughly 70–75% planned; anything under 50% usually means assets are being run to failure. The ratio is easier to move than most FMs expect, because a handful of repeat-failure assets typically account for most reactive cost.

How AutoFM delivers PPM

Our engineers work from a compliance calendar in AiMS: each visit is geofenced and timed to the minute, certificates are uploaded before the engineer leaves, and your compliance dashboard shows every statutory item per site. See our planned maintenance and compliance service or read how a PPM-first approach removed a repeat burst-pipe risk.