Maintanance is one of the commonest misspellings in industry and it is searched thousands of times a month, so rather than correct it and stop, this page answers the question behind it. Maintenance, spelled that way, is the function that keeps equipment working: a register of what you own, a schedule of what each thing needs, a work order raised when something needs doing, and a history of what was actually done. Those four things are the whole job, and understanding how they fit together is more useful than any spelling note.
The register comes first and is usually unfinished
You cannot schedule what you cannot list. Almost every maintenance function that feels chaotic is one whose register was never completed, and the assets that get missed are the ones between departments: the compressor everybody uses and nobody owns is the one that fails.
The schedule is a claim on people's time
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. A schedule written without that arithmetic is a wish, and it will lose to breakdowns every time.
The work order is where the record is made or lost
One job, one asset, with what was found and how long it took. Miss the last two and you have a compliance record rather than a maintenance one: it proves work happened and teaches you nothing. Those two fields are also the ones a technician has to think to write, which is why they are the first casualty of a hurried close and the reason a year of records can contain no usable information at all.
The history is the point of all of it
Every interval is a guess until somebody can look back at what the last three visits to that machine found. That is what the register, the schedule and the work orders exist to accumulate, and it is why the found field is worth arguing about.
Questions people ask about maintanance
How is maintenance spelled?
M-a-i-n-t-e-n-a-n-c-e. The i-before-the-a in the middle is the part that trips people up, and maintanance is the near-universal result.
What does a maintenance department actually do?
Keeps a register, runs a schedule against it, responds to breakdowns, and records what was done. The balance between the middle two is the whole of maintenance management.
What is the difference between maintenance and repair?
Repair is fixing something broken. Maintenance includes repair but also the scheduled work done so that fewer things break, which is where the money is.