Maintenance overview
What the Maintenance module is for, who uses it, and the key ideas behind assets, requests, work orders and preventive plans.
What Maintenance is for
Maintenance keeps one record of everything your company has to keep running: machines, air conditioning, generators, IT equipment, tools and vehicles-as-equipment. For each item (an asset) it records what went wrong, who fixed it, which parts and hours it took, how long it stood still, and what it cost. It also plans the repeat work, such as a quarterly chiller service, so jobs are created before things break.
Who uses it
- Staff and requesters report a problem with Report Issue.
- Maintenance managers review and approve requests, plan and assign jobs, watch the dashboard and close jobs.
- Technicians open My Work, start and pause jobs, tick off tasks and complete them.
- Planners build preventive plans and generate the jobs that fall due.
- Administrators keep the lists, teams, technicians and settings up to date.
Key ideas
- Asset. One piece of equipment. Assets sit in a location and can sit under a parent asset (a motor under a production line). Cost, downtime and open work of children add up on the parent. Opening an asset shows the Asset 360: figures, plans, readings, parts, downtime and cost in one place.
- Request. A problem report. A request is not a job. It goes New, Review, Approved, then becomes a work order (or is rejected).
- Work order. The job itself. It moves through Draft, Approved, Scheduled or Assigned, In Progress, Completed and Closed. It can also wait for parts or a vendor, be put on hold, or be cancelled.
- Maintenance type. Corrective, Preventive, Predictive, Condition Based, Emergency, Inspection, Calibration, Breakdown, Improvement, Shutdown or Warranty. Corrective, Emergency and Breakdown jobs are repairs: they need a failure record before they can be completed, and their downtime counts as unplanned.
- Preventive plan. A rule that creates work orders on a calendar interval, a meter reading, or whichever comes first.
- Meter. A counter or gauge on an asset (operating hours, kilometres, temperature). Readings can start preventive jobs or raise alerts.
- Downtime. The time an asset is not working. It drives availability, MTBF and MTTR.
- Cost ledger. Every cost (labour, parts, vendor, travel, tools, downtime, other) goes into one ledger. A work order and the asset both read their totals from it.
How it connects to other modules
| Module | What Maintenance does with it |
|---|---|
| Inventory | Reserves and issues spare parts from a warehouse; returns unused parts. |
| Accounting | Posts the parts issue: debit Operating expense, credit the product's stock account (can be switched off). |
| Purchase | Creates a purchase order for outside work, or a draft request for quotation for a parts shortage. |
| HR | Technicians are employees; an employee linked to a user sees My Work. |
| Projects and branches | A work order can carry a project and a branch, copied from the asset. |
Where things stand
Maintenance is working but not yet approved for production use. Some things are not available yet: offline sync on mobile, drawn signatures (you type a name), photo capture in inspections, native sensor adapters, and posting labour or downtime to the accounts.
Next: Get started.