Should die PM run on shot count or the calendar?

A stamping die gets its scheduled six-week service on the Monday it falls due. Everything looks fine, so it goes back in, and three days later a section cracks mid run and takes the job down for the afternoon. Across the same plant another die is serviced every six weeks like clockwork and has not genuinely needed half of those services in a year, because it only runs the odd short job. One die failed because the calendar came too late. The other quietly burns toolroom hours because the calendar comes too often. Both are being run on the wrong clock.

A die keeps time in hits, not weeks

Putting a pump on a fixed calendar is a fair bet, because it degrades mostly with elapsed time and steady running. A production die is a different animal. It wears against the parts it makes, the punch and die clearances rounding off, the coating going, the sections fatiguing with every hit. Two identical dies that came off the same build can be a month apart in real wear if one ran three shifts and the other ran one. The honest unit for that wear is the produced-part count, the hits since the last service, not the days since. Trigger the service on the count and a busy die gets seen before it fails, while an idle one is not pulled apart for no reason. For most toolrooms this single change removes the bulk of both the surprise failures and the wasted services at once.

The calendar is not wrong, it is just the wrong clock for wear

Switching everything to counts and scrapping the calendar overcorrects, because some things really do decay on time whether the die runs or not. A die sitting in storage can rust. Preservative dries out, grease migrates, urethane and rubber components age and go hard. None of that cares how many hits the die has run, and a pure count trigger will happily let an idle die corrode on the shelf because its counter never moved. So the two triggers are not rivals. They cover different failure modes, and a die needs both.

Knowing which clock fired matters months later

Say you move to count-based triggers and the failures drop. Good. Now a harder question arrives, from an auditor or from your own toolroom planning the next overhaul. Not just was this die maintained, but was it maintained on the right basis, and what interval was it actually run to. If the PM record holds only a date, you cannot answer either one. You want the produced-part count at the service, the interval it was set against, which trigger fired the work, and the outcome. A service logged as done on the fourteenth tells you almost nothing a year on. A service logged as done at 240,000 hits against a 250,000 hit interval tells the whole story, and it tells it to the next planner as plainly as it tells the auditor.

Put the clock on the tool, not on a shared wall planner

All of this needs the maintenance trigger to live on the die record and read the work, rather than sitting as a row on a calendar that knows nothing about how hard the die ran. In VoraTool, preventive maintenance is logged against the die itself, and a PM event carries its trigger, the produced-part count or date it was due, the interval and the result, so the die record holds every service in one place beside its job cards, repairs and spare usage. The toolroom planning board then lays the due work onto real days and real toolmakers, so work that is coming due turns into a scheduled job instead of a Monday surprise. When someone asks whether this die was maintained at the right interval and on the right basis, the answer is a read of the tool record, not a reconstruction from a wall planner and a memory of how hard it ran.