Maintenance & CMMS glossary.

Asset lifecycle management is planning, tracking and making decisions about an asset at every stage of its life, from purchase through maintenance to replacement and disposal.

An asset registry is the authoritative list of maintainable equipment, each entry carrying its identifier, location, documents, linked spare parts and maintenance history.

A CMMS, or computerized maintenance management system, is software that records maintenance assets, work orders, preventive maintenance schedules and spare parts use in one connected system.

Condition-based maintenance triggers work from an observed asset condition, such as vibration, temperature or a health score crossing a threshold, rather than from a fixed schedule.

Downtime is the time during which equipment is not able to run when it is needed, whether because of a failure or a stop planned in advance.

EAM, or enterprise asset management, is software that manages physical assets across their full lifecycle, from acquisition and depreciation to maintenance and disposal.

Equipment maintenance is the planned and unplanned work that keeps all of a site's equipment, production and supporting, in safe, working condition.

Guided triage is a branching troubleshooting flow that walks an operator through safe diagnostic steps, so a fault can be narrowed or made safe before a technician arrives.

Idle time is time when equipment is able to run but is not producing, for example while waiting for material, an operator, an order or a changeover.

Lockout/tagout is the practice of physically isolating and locking an energy source before maintenance work, with a tag identifying who applied the lock.

A machine health score is a 0 to 100 rating derived from an asset's failure history, maintenance compliance and open issues, used to rank risk across a fleet.

Machine maintenance is the inspection, servicing, adjustment and repair of production machines so that they keep running safely and reliably.

Maintenance backlog is the total volume of identified but incomplete work, usually expressed in crew-weeks rather than job count.

MOE, or Machine Overall Effectiveness, is the Firmicore composite score that blends availability, maintenance compliance, reliability and machine health into one number per machine.

MRO, or maintenance, repair and operations, covers the parts, supplies and services a plant buys to keep running, as opposed to materials that go into the product.

MRO inventory is the stock of spare parts and consumables held to support maintenance, repair and operations work rather than to be sold.

MTBF, or mean time between failures, is total operating time divided by the number of failures, and measures reliability rather than repair speed.

MTTA, or mean time to acknowledge, is the average time between a fault being reported and someone accepting responsibility for it.

MTTR, or mean time to repair, is total repair time across incidents divided by the number of repairs, measured over a defined period and set of assets.

Multi-tenancy is an architecture where one application instance serves many customer organizations while keeping each organization's data fully isolated from the others.

A near miss is an incident that could have caused injury or damage but did not, recorded so the cause can be fixed before it repeats.

OEE, or overall equipment effectiveness, is availability multiplied by performance multiplied by quality, expressed as the percentage of planned production time that was truly productive.

A permit to work is a documented authorization that a specific high-risk job may proceed, listing the precautions taken and the person who accepted them.

Planned maintenance is any maintenance work that is identified and prepared in advance, with the job defined, parts and people arranged, and the stop agreed with production.

PM compliance is the percentage of preventive maintenance tasks completed within their scheduled window over a period.

Preventive maintenance is work scheduled by elapsed time or by meter reading to prevent a failure, rather than work triggered by a failure that already happened.

Proactive maintenance is work done to stop failures from happening, by removing their causes and catching problems early, rather than waiting for equipment to break.

QR-triggered reporting attaches a fault report to the correct asset by scanning a code fixed to the machine, so the operator does not have to identify it by number.

Reactive maintenance, also called run-to-failure, is repair work that starts only after an asset has already failed.

A root cause is the underlying condition whose removal prevents a failure from recurring, as distinct from the visible symptom that stopped the machine.

Scheduled maintenance is work set to happen at fixed intervals, by calendar date or usage, regardless of the asset's current condition.

A shift handover is the structured transfer of maintenance context from the outgoing crew to the incoming one: pending jobs, ongoing breakdowns, low stock and machines to watch.

Unplanned downtime is production time lost to a failure that was not scheduled, measured from the moment output stops to the moment it resumes.

A work order is the record of one maintenance job: what is to be done, on which asset, by whom, with which parts, and what was found.