Along with issue management and remedial maintenance, performing preventive maintenance, inspections, audits and other categories of pre-planned, scripted activities is one of the fundamental components of operations and maintenance projects.

Designed to support traditional preventive maintenance and inspection (PM&I) workflows, IMMS PM&I Management capabilities have expanded to provide support for any user-defined recurring inspection, testing, maintenance, and audit activities. IMMS PM&I Management capabilities fall into the following categories:

• Defining work procedures – a collection of features focused on authoring and managing interactive scripts (i.e., smart forms) that embody the work procedure and data collection requirements, thus enabling consistent execution and reliable capture of work completion evidence, system configuration and performance baseline
• PM Plan – a high-level planning capability focused on proactive compliance management for large-scale maintenance and inspection programs
• Managing schedule – the capabilities focused on defining the PM&I schedule generation and maintenance
• Work completion tracking –functionality focused on tracking the execution of work in accordance with the defined schedule and interactive procedures and the reliable gathering of work completion and system configuration and performance baseline
• Reporting and analysis – tools focused on the overall compliance and effectiveness of the recurring maintenance and inspection program, as well as procedures and attribute-level reporting

IMMS provides support for this kind of activities under the common name "Preventive Maintenance and Inspections".  Despit the name "Preventive Maintenance", the content of this guide applies equally to work activities that share the following characteristics:

• The work consists of pre-defined tasks, and the content of each task, including the work steps and the data to be collected, is pre-defined by a template, which will be referred to as "form"
• Each task is associated with a system element, e.g. a device or component, or even an entire system
• Different forms may be defined for different tasks
• The tasks are executed on a set schedule (e.g. monthly, or weekly) 

The subsequent sections of the guide will discuss the steps involved in setting up the preventive maintenance schedule, monitoring its progress, and completing the works.