Lesson 3 of 10 · 9 min

Auditing how maintenance works today

Written by Melek Mehrez, founder of FreeMaint · Last reviewed October 11, 2026

Lesson objective

By the end of this lesson, you can map how requests, work orders, preventive tasks and spare parts flow today, and give each existing data source a verdict: keep, clean or leave behind.

Before you choose software or import anything, you need an honest picture of how maintenance works today: not how the procedure says it works, but how a breakdown is actually reported, handled and closed.

The audit produces two things: a map of the four flows that a CMMS will take over, and a verdict on every data source, so that you know what is worth migrating, what must be cleaned first and what stays behind.

Map the four flows

Follow the four flows one at a time, from the first signal to the last record. Ask the people who do the work and, whenever you can, follow a real case from start to finish.

Questions to ask for each flow
Flow	Questions to ask
Requests	How does a problem reach maintenance: phone, radio, paper, email, a visit? Who decides what is urgent? How does the requester learn that it is fixed?
Work orders	Who assigns jobs, and how? What is written down at the end: cause, time spent, parts used? Where does that record end up?
Preventive	Which tasks exist, at what frequency, and who keeps the list? How do you know that a task was done, or skipped?
Spare parts	Where are parts stored and listed? How does a technician know that a part is in stock? Who reorders, and when?

For each flow, write down three things: the tool used (paper, whiteboard, spreadsheet, old software or memory), the people involved, and the points where information gets lost. These losses are the problems the CMMS has to solve, and they connect directly to the goals you set in lesson 1.

Give each data source a verdict

List every place where maintenance data lives today: equipment lists, preventive spreadsheets, work order logs, parts lists, manuals, supplier contacts. Rate each one on three questions: is it complete, is it up to date, and is each item listed only once?

Three verdicts for existing data
Verdict	When	What to do
Keep	Complete, current and without duplicates	Migrate it as it is, after a quick check
Clean	Useful, but with duplicates, gaps or mixed formats	Fix it before importing it (lesson 6)
Leave behind	Outdated, unreliable or never used	Archive it read-only and do not migrate it

History deserves its own decision. Years of closed work orders rarely justify the effort of a full migration. A common rule is to migrate only what you will use: open work orders, preventive plans, and a summary of the last twelve months of breakdowns on critical equipment.

Paper, spreadsheet or old software: what you can recover

What each kind of source usually yields
Source	What you can usually recover	Typical problems
Paper and whiteboards	Recent open jobs, the list of recurring tasks	Nothing is searchable, history is partial
Spreadsheets	Equipment lists, preventive schedules, parts lists	Duplicates, dates typed as text, several versions of the same file
Old software	Equipment, plans, history and parts	Awkward export formats, codes nobody remembers, fields used for something else

Old software can usually export to CSV or Excel. Ask for a full export early, even before choosing the new tool: some vendors take weeks to provide one, and the contract may limit how long the data stays available after you leave.

Example

The audit at the packaging plant

The audit takes two weeks. By following ten breakdowns from the first call to the restart, the team finds that phone requests reliably reach the whiteboard only when the maintenance manager is on site: at night, about one request in four is never written down.

The preventive spreadsheet lists 180 tasks, but 30 concern machines that were scrapped, and frequencies are written in three different ways. Verdict: clean before import. The equipment list exists in two versions, one from purchasing and one from maintenance, with different names for the same machines: clean and merge.

Five years of paper work orders stay in the archive; only the last twelve months on the two filling lines are summarized. The storekeeper's parts spreadsheet is up to date but contains duplicates. Verdict: clean, and a simple deduplication will do.

Four common mistakes

Auditing from the procedures instead of watching real cases.
Asking only managers, never the technicians and operators.
Deciding to migrate everything, just in case.
Waiting until the new software is in place to discover the state of the data.

In FreeMaint

Included in Core (free)

Use the import templates as a checklist

Every FreeMaint list that can be imported (assets, locations, parts, preventive plans, work orders, requests…) offers a template with the expected columns. Comparing your sources with these templates during the audit shows which fields are missing before anything is migrated.

Read the documentation

Template for this lesson

Current-state audit checklist

Excel (.xlsx), blank, printable, with automatic verdicts