This page is about preventive maintenance tools in the software sense rather than the toolbox sense: the things that hold a plan together rather than the spanners that carry it out. There are four of them, they are the same four at every site, and most maintenance departments already own some version of each, usually in different places. Naming them separately is useful because it shows you which one is actually broken, and it is almost never the one people reach to replace.
The asset register and the scheduler
The register is the list of what you look after, with enough on each entry to find it and identify it: what it is, where it is, and what it is called by the people who work on it. The scheduler is what turns intervals on those assets into dated work. Sites that keep both in one spreadsheet have not made a mistake; they have made the two inseparable, which is why moving one visit feels like editing a document.
The checklist and the record
The checklist is what a visit consists of, per asset type, and it is usually the tool that exists only in an experienced person's head. The record is what was actually done, and it is the one most often missing entirely. A site can run for years without a written checklist and will feel the absence of the record the first time anybody asks a question about last year.
Which one is usually broken
Almost always the record, and almost always because it lives on paper or in an inbox rather than against the asset. The register is usually adequate, the checklist is usually in somebody's head and works until they leave, and the scheduler is usually a spreadsheet that is wrong in a known way people work around. Fixing the record first gives you the biggest improvement for the least disruption.
Questions people ask about preventive maintenance tools
Do we need all four in one product?
It is easier if the register, the schedule and the record are in one place, because they constantly refer to each other. Checklists can live elsewhere if they must, though they usually end up wherever the visit is completed.
What about physical tools and test equipment?
Those are their own problem, including calibration dates, and some sites track them as assets on the same register. It works well, as long as you accept that a calibration due date is just another interval.
Where should the checklist live?
Attached to the asset type, so a new asset of that type inherits it and nobody rewrites it. Checklists kept per asset drift apart within a year and nobody notices until two identical units are being serviced differently.