Meter / Runtime-Based PM Trigger: Service Gear on Use, Not on a Calendar

The problem this kills

Calendar-based maintenance treats every machine the same. The forklift that ran two shifts a day all month gets serviced on the exact same date as the one that sat idle in the corner. One gets over-maintained and you burn labor and parts you didn't need; the other gets under-maintained and fails mid-shift — exactly when you can least afford it.

The honest truth is that wear tracks use, not the calendar. A pump's bearings care about run hours. A press cares about cycles. A copier cares about copies. A vehicle cares about mileage. You almost certainly already capture these numbers somewhere — on a clipboard, in a dashboard photo, in a spreadsheet a tech updates on Fridays. What you're missing is the thing that watches those numbers, knows each asset's service interval, and raises a flag the instant a machine is due — before it breaks, and without burying a human in math. You do not need to be a developer to build that thing.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for your maintenance team. You load your asset list — each with its meter type (run hours, cycles, copies, mileage), its current reading, and its service interval. Then you record meter readings as they come in. The tool compares each asset's usage since its last service against its interval and sorts everything into due, approaching, and OK — and it projects the next due date from how fast each asset is actually being used, so you can plan ahead instead of reacting. A planner reviews each triggered recommendation against the latest reading and clicks Approve or Dismiss. Only on approval does the tool create a PM work order, assign it, and reset the interval baseline so the next cycle counts from here. Everything exports as CSV: the due list, the work orders, the reading history.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your asset types and how they're named or numbered, which meters you track and in what units, how readings get captured today, your real service intervals, your "approaching" warning threshold, who's allowed to approve a PM, and the messy edge cases like meter rollovers, replaced meters, and the fat-finger reading that's lower than last time. It reads a short spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then builds the tool around your assets and rules instead of a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the reading capture, the validation that readings only ever increase, the due/approaching engine with usage-rate projection, the approval gate, the work-order creation with baseline reset, and the CSV exports. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a toy. The plan builds in the controls a real maintenance operation needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so people only see their own site's or organization's assets, a complete audit trail of every reading, trigger, approval, and dismissal (who, what, when, and why), a hard human-approval gate so no work order is created until a planner signs off, and duplicate guards so the same asset can't spawn a second PM trigger until the prior service is actually logged. The whole tool exists to make a careful human decision easy — the system raises the recommendation, a planner makes the call.

Who it's for

Maintenance planners, plant and facilities engineers, and fleet or equipment managers who are tired of the calendar lying to them — over-servicing idle gear and getting blindsided by the workhorses. If you can tell me what your assets are, what you measure them in, and when each one is due, you can build this.

You've got this — open the plan, paste the first prompt, and you'll be flagging your first usage-based PM this weekend.