How to Run a Maintenance Audit: 7-Step Guide & Checklist

Here’s a truth every maintenance manager knows deep down: Your equipment always tells on you. If your maintenance program is sloppy, it shows up in surprise downtime, inflated maintenance costs and grumpy stakeholders.

That’s why a maintenance audit is essential. Think of it as putting your maintenance department under a microscope. It reveals the maintenance activities, processes and workflows that keep your operations healthy — and the inefficiencies that don’t.

While a maintenance audit sounds about as fun as a root canal, it’s actually an opportunity to turn your operations from a cost center to a profit driver. It’s how you identify the bottlenecks in your workflows, reduce maintenance costs and prove the value of your department to the entire organization. 

In this guide, we’ll break down what a maintenance audit is, why it matters, the key areas it should cover and provide a ready-to-use maintenance audit checklist. We’ll also show you how a modern CMMS like Coast makes audits faster, more accurate and less painful.

What Is a Maintenance Audit?

A maintenance audit is a structured audit process that evaluates every aspect of your asset management, from the way you track equipment to how you handle work order management. The goal isn’t to play the blame game. It’s to evaluate your team’s efficiency, cost-effectiveness and overall alignment with your business goals. It helps answer these questions:

• Are your maintenance strategies working?
• Are your maintenance procedures aligned with industry standards?
• Are your maintenance goals effective, and are you tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) accurately?
• Is your team’s time being allocated effectively?

It’s also important to note the different types of maintenance audits to perform them effectively:

• Internal audits: Your own audit team looks at whether you’re following policies.
• External audits: Third-party consultants benchmark your performance.
• Regulatory audits: OSHA, ISO or others check if you’re compliant.
  

In short: A maintenance audit is about visibility. You can’t fix what you don’t measure.

Why a Maintenance Audit Matters

An audit uncovers problems that are hiding in plain sight, costing your company money and valuable uptime. Without one, you’re just guessing. You’re operating on a gut feeling, and gut feelings don’t impress stakeholders. An audit gives you the cold, hard metrics you need to drive change. It’s how you can:

• Pinpoint the real causes of downtime: You might think it’s a faulty machine, but a maintenance audit might reveal it’s a lack of spare parts or a flaw in your preventive maintenance schedule.
• Reduce costs: This can be the ultimate cost saver by highlighting wasteful maintenance practices and other opportunities to save.
• Evaluate your team’s workload: Is your team bogged down with corrective actions from old breakdowns? Are they spending too much time on manual tasks that could be automated?
• Improve safety and compliance: Prove to regulators (and your CEO) that you’re meeting industry standards.
• Justify your existence: In a world where every department is fighting for resources, an audit provides the data you need to prove your team’s value. It’s how you can show leadership that investing in maintenance is a smart business decision, not an expense.
• Support continuous improvement: Audits aren’t one-and-done. They’re feedback loops that push maintenance initiatives forward.
  

Take the example of a manufacturing facility that ran without audits for two years. Their maintenance work became chaotic, work orders piled up, and they ignored their preventive maintenance schedule. The result? Skyrocketing equipment downtime. Once they reintroduced structured audits, they identified their backlog, reallocated maintenance personnel and saw a 20 percent jump in uptime.

Key Areas a Maintenance Audit Covers

A maintenance audit should cover multiple aspects of your operations. Otherwise, you may only get half the story. Key areas to audit include:

• Work order management: Are work orders tracked from request to completion? Is there visibility into your maintenance backlog?
• Preventive maintenance: Are preventive maintenance tasks completed on time? Is the preventive maintenance audit revealing missed PMs?
• Parts inventory management: Are spare parts stocked properly? Do reorder points exist for critical assets?
• Maintenance records: Are records accurate, digital and retrievable in real time?
• Maintenance costs and budget: Is the maintenance budget being allocated efficiently? Are maintenance KPIs tracked against benchmarks?
• Maintenance personnel and training: Are team members trained, certified and engaged?
• Safety and compliance: Do standard operating procedures (SOPs) align with regulations?

How to Run a Maintenance Audit Step-by-Step

The secret to a successful maintenance audit is having a solid plan. Here’s step-by-step guidance on how to prepare for one:

1. Define Your Audit Scope & Audit Team

First things first: what are you looking at? Are you doing a focused preventive maintenance audit or a full-scale review of all maintenance operations? Once you’ve defined the scope, build your audit team. This isn’t just a job for the maintenance manager. The best teams include key stakeholders from across the organization — a reliability engineer, a finance rep and a few maintenance personnel who can give you an in-the-trenches perspective.

2. Gather Your Data

Before you can fix anything, you have to know what you’re up against. This is where you get real. Collect every piece of data you can find:

• Work orders: Pull up all completed and outstanding work orders. How many are reactive versus proactive? What’s the average completion time?
• Maintenance costs: Get detailed reports on maintenance costs, including labor, spare parts and third-party vendors.
• Maintenance records: Dig into all maintenance records and logs. Look for patterns of equipment failures and repeated maintenance work.
• Downtime metrics: Track every minute of unplanned downtime and its associated cost. This is your most powerful piece of evidence.

If you’re using a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), this step is much easier. The data is already there in a structured format, waiting to be analyzed. If you’re still using spreadsheets, you know the pain.

3. Interview Key Personnel

Data tells you what happened, but it doesn’t always tell you why. This is where you get out of the office and talk to your team members. Ask them about their daily workflows. What are their biggest frustrations? What information is missing? You might uncover that a maintenance procedure is so convoluted that everyone ignores it or that a lack of spare parts is the primary reason for equipment failures.

4. Evaluate Your Maintenance Strategies

Now it’s time to look at the big picture. Do your current maintenance strategies and maintenance plan align with the company’s goals? Are you using industry standards as a benchmark? Do you have a robust preventive maintenance program in place, or are you just running things until they break? This step is about identifying gaps and looking for new initiatives.

5. Identify Corrective Actions

This is when you put on your problem-solving hat. Use the data you’ve gathered and the insights from your team to pinpoint specific, actionable corrective actions. Maybe you discover that your SOPs for a specific machine are outdated. Or maybe you find that communication is a major source of inefficiencies. Your findings will guide your next steps.

6. Develop an Action Plan

An audit without a plan is just a list of complaints. Once you have your corrective actions, create a clear action plan. This plan should include specific, measurable goals. For example, you might set a goal to reduce reactive maintenance by 20 percent in the next quarter or to improve uptime on a specific critical asset by 15 percent. Assign roles and responsibilities to team members, and set clear deadlines.

7. Review & Implement

The audit process doesn’t end when you submit the report. It’s an ongoing cycle of continuous improvement. Implement your action plan and schedule regular follow-up reviews. Monitor your KPIs to track progress. Your maintenance audit is not a one-and-done project. It’s a mindset that leads to a healthier, more cost-effective maintenance operation.

Maintenance Audit Checklist (The Complete Guide)

Now that you’ve determined how you want to perform an audit and identified key goals, here’s your go-to maintenance audit checklist. Use it as-is, or adapt it to your maintenance operations:

1. Review maintenance procedures: Ensure documentation exists and matches reality.
2. Check CMMS records: Verify accuracy of maintenance data, work orders and asset logs.
3. Audit preventive maintenance program: Compare actual versus planned preventive maintenance schedule.
4. Inspect critical assets: Assess condition, performance and maintenance history.
5. Evaluate inventory management: Confirm spare parts stock levels and reorder settings.
6. Assess compliance: Check against OSHA, ISO and other industry standards.
7. Review training records: Ensure maintenance personnel hold the right certifications.
8. Analyze metrics: Track KPIs, performance metrics and cost-effectiveness.
9. Vendor and contract review: Verify contractor accountability and SLA compliance.
10. Generate audit report: Share findings, assign corrective actions and document next steps.

Pro tip: Automate these steps in your CMMS to ensure consistency.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Maintenance Audits

As with any process, a maintenance audit can result in several mistakes that you want to avoid. These include:

• Only auditing compliance: Passing OSHA doesn’t mean you’re efficient.
• Ignoring downtime: Don’t forget to audit actual downtime trends and equipment failures.
• Relying on spreadsheets: Without maintenance software, audits become guesswork.
• Skipping follow-up: An audit without action is just paperwork.

How a CMMS Like Coast Simplifies Maintenance Audits

The best way to conduct an effective maintenance audit and act on its findings is with a powerful, flexible tool. Manually tracking maintenance data  in spreadsheets is a recipe for disaster and will make your audit a long, painful process. A CMMS like Coast can automate the data collection process, making your audit a breeze.

With Coast, you can:

• Generate instant reports: Pull up reports on all your maintenance activities in real time. See the complete history of every piece of equipment, from its last repair to its complete lifecycle.
• Streamline work order management: Automatically track every work order from creation to completion. Our mobile app allows your team to easily update tasks and add notes from the field, ensuring you always have accurate maintenance records.
• Automate PMs: Coast makes it easy to set up and track your preventive maintenance plan. Get automated notifications for upcoming maintenance tasks, so nothing slips through the cracks.
• Store critical data: Our software allows you to attach documents, SOPs and other templates directly to assets and work orders. This ensures that every team member has the information they need to do their job correctly, reducing costly mistakes.

An all-in-one platform like Coast gives you a single source of truth for all your maintenance data. This not only makes your current maintenance audit easier, but it also provides a framework for continuous improvement and a culture of accountability moving forward.

Turn Maintenance Audits Into Continuous Improvement

A maintenance audit isn’t a punishment. It’s about taking an honest look at your processes, making smart changes and ultimately saving your company time, money and headaches.

With the right maintenance audit checklist and a CMMS like Coast, you’ll transform audits from dreaded “gotchas” into tools for smarter maintenance management, better asset lifespan and happier stakeholders.

Your equipment is talking. Audits make sure you’re actually listening. Sign up for a free Coast account today, and start your maintenance journey with a tool built for real-world problems.