Asset maintenance is the whole business of keeping the things you own working, and it has four stages that most organisations complete in order and then stop somewhere in the middle. List what you own. Decide which of those things matter if they stop. Decide what each needs and how often. Record what was actually done so that the third decision can be revisited. Almost everybody finishes the first, most finish the second informally and in somebody's head, many do the third once, and very few do the fourth well enough for it to feed back. This page is about all four and about the feedback loop that closes them.
The register is a working document, not an inventory
Finance's asset list answers what was bought and what it is worth. A maintenance register answers where the thing is, what has to be isolated to work on it, and what it needs. The two overlap and are not the same list, and trying to make one serve both spends the project on reconciliation.
Criticality is what makes the rest affordable
What halts if it fails, how long a replacement takes, whether a spare exists, whether anybody gets hurt. Ranking that turns a flat list into a plan: tighter intervals and spares where it matters, and a deliberate, written run-to-failure decision where it does not.
The schedule is a claim on hours
180 assets at four tasks a year at 1.1 hours is 60 jobs and 66 technician hours a month on the worked example this site publishes, $3,168 at a $48 loaded rate. Any schedule agreed without that arithmetic will be deferred rather than worked.
The loop closes on findings, and almost nobody closes it
Once a year, read what the checks actually found per asset. Items that never find anything lengthen or come off; faults appearing between checks mean the interval is wrong. This is the highest-value hour in the maintenance year and it depends entirely on somebody having written findings down.
Questions people ask about asset maintenance
What is the difference between asset maintenance and asset management?
Maintenance is keeping the thing working. Asset management is the wider financial and lifecycle question of what to own, when to replace and what it costs across its life.
Where do most sites stop?
At a schedule with no feedback. The intervals get set once, from the manuals, and are never revisited because the findings to revisit them with were never recorded.
Do small sites need all four stages?
The stages scale down but do not drop out. A site with thirty assets still needs to know which three matter most, and that ranking takes an afternoon.