An equipment maintenance agreement is a contract under which a vendor or a contractor maintains a piece of equipment the site owns: the lift, the chiller, the packaging line under warranty, the imaging equipment in a clinic. The site is still responsible for the asset and still needs its history, so the agreement has to say what is done, how often, how fast a fault is answered, and what record is left behind. This page lists what to check before signing and how the site keeps its own record of the visits so that the asset's history is complete whoever does the work.
Scope and intervals
What tasks the agreement covers: the preventive visits and what each includes, the statutory tests, and whether repairs are included or charged. The interval of each visit, stated as a schedule the site can put on its own calendar. What is excluded: consumables, damage, parts over an age. An agreement that says annual service and nothing else has not said what will be done, and the site cannot check it.
Response and parts
The response time to a fault call, by priority, and what counts as the clock starting. Whether parts are held, where, and how long a repair waits for one. Whether a loan unit is provided. Those three decide the downtime on the asset when it fails, and downtime is what the site is paying to reduce. Compare the response time with the consequence of the asset being down; a next-day response on the only chiller in a data room is the wrong agreement.
Records
What the contractor leaves after each visit: a service report saying what was done, what was found, what was replaced, and any recommendation; the certificate for a statutory test; the next due date. The agreement should require it, and the site should file it against the asset on a work order of its own, so that the asset's history holds the contractor's visits beside the site's own work. A recommendation in a report that the site never raised as a work order is the commonest way a contracted asset fails.
Exit and the site's own record
What happens at the end: the handover of records, the state of the equipment, and whether the site may service it itself or use another contractor afterwards. Throughout, the site raises a work order for each contracted visit, records the report against it, and raises its own corrective work for recommendations. The maintenance work order template worksheet on this site serves for that; a CMMS attaches the report to the work order and dates the next visit from it.
Questions people ask about equipment maintenance agreement
Does the site need its own record if the contractor keeps one?
Yes. The contractor's record is theirs and in their format; the site's history has to hold the asset's whole life across contractors and its own work.
Should preventive visits be in the agreement or bought separately?
In the agreement, with the interval stated, so that the visits happen on schedule rather than when the contractor has capacity.
What is the most common gap in maintenance agreements?
Recommendations in service reports that nobody at the site turns into work orders. Read every report and raise the work.