Service history
A service history is the complete record of maintenance, repairs and inspections carried out on a specific item, with dates, work done and cost.
A service history is the complete record of maintenance, repairs and inspections carried out on a specific item, with dates, work done and cost.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: maintenance history, equipment service record.
Two identical machines bought on the same day diverge immediately, because one gets used harder, transported more roughly or operated less carefully. A history kept at model level averages away exactly the differences you need.
Everything useful in a service history depends on it being attached to the individual item — which in turn depends on that item having a unique identifier that survives its whole life.
Date, what was done, who did it, cost, and any parts fitted. Attach the invoice or report. If the work followed a fault report, link the two, because the sequence from symptom to resolution is more informative than either end alone.
Cost is the field most often skipped and the one that makes the history financially useful. Without it you have a maintenance diary; with it you have the basis for a replacement decision.
Repair or replace. An item whose cumulative repair spend is approaching replacement cost is arguing for itself, and the argument is only available if the spend was recorded per item.
Warranty and recourse. Manufacturers and insurers ask for evidence that prescribed servicing was carried out. Missing records routinely cost more than the servicing would have.
Resale. Documented maintenance raises what used equipment fetches, for the same reason it does with cars.
Without a per-item service history, repair-or-replace decisions are made on impressions, warranty claims fail for lack of evidence, and the same recurring fault is fixed repeatedly without anyone noticing the pattern.
Itefy keeps maintenance, repairs, issues and events on the item with costs and attached documents, so the whole history is on the record rather than in a folder. Read more.
For the life of the item at minimum, and beyond it where regulation or warranty requires. Records cost almost nothing to retain and are unrecoverable once discarded.
Yes, measurably, for the same reason a documented service history raises a car's price — it converts the buyer's guess about condition into evidence.
A maintenance schedule is the plan of what servicing each item needs, at what interval, and who is responsible for doing it.
DefinitionPreventive maintenance is servicing equipment on a planned schedule — by time or by usage — to reduce the chance of it failing unexpectedly in use.
DefinitionMTBF is the average operating time between one failure and the next for repairable equipment, used as a reliability measure.
DefinitionAn equipment condition report is a dated record of the physical and working state of a specific item, used to track deterioration and settle damage questions.
DefinitionCalibration is the documented comparison of an instrument's readings against a known reference, and any adjustment needed to bring it back within tolerance.
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