GLOSSARY
The words maintenance teams actually use.
Maintenance vocabulary is not decorative — a shared word is what makes a handover, a report and a spare-parts list mean the same thing to everybody. Where UR Maintain uses a term in a particular way, this page says so.
WORK AND WORKFLOW
From a report to a finished job.
The product keeps these apart on purpose; collapsing them is where maintenance systems start to lie.
Work request (defect report)
A report that something is wrong, before anyone has decided what to do about it. It is a record of its own: a report can be filed in seconds, with no network, and it can never point at a job that does not exist.
Work order
The decision to do the work, with an owner, a priority and a status. Created from a triaged report, from a preventive plan, or directly by someone who may assign work.
Triage
Deciding what a report becomes — converted into work, rejected, or cancelled. It is a step, not a label, and the report's own status records it.
Breakdown
Work caused by equipment that has stopped. It is a work type rather than a priority: a breakdown is not automatically urgent, and an urgent job is not automatically a breakdown.
Corrective maintenance
Work done because something failed or was found out of condition — as opposed to work done before it could fail.
Preventive maintenance (PM)
Work done on a schedule or a counter, before failure. In UR Maintain a plan is a definition with a revision history, and the work orders it produces are ordinary work orders.
Inspection
A structured check carried out against a published checklist version. The answers are recorded against the items that version actually contained.
Backlog
Open work that has not been started. Useful as a number, misleading as a target: a backlog of genuinely low-priority work is not the same as one nobody has looked at.
Machine restored vs report completed
The rule the whole work-order model is built around. Reporting the machine running is a fact about the equipment and does not move the job; completing the report is a fact about the paperwork. A line can be back in service at 03:00 with the report written after the shift.
TIME, FAILURES AND RELIABILITY
The numbers maintenance is judged on — and the one we refuse to invent.
These are general maintenance measures. UR Maintain records the history they are calculated from; it does not publish figures it cannot support.
MTBF — mean time between failures
For repairable equipment, the average operating time between failures. It only means something if failures are recorded consistently, which is exactly what a field-friendly reporting flow is for.
MTTR — mean time to repair
The average time to restore equipment after a failure. It measures the repair, not the wait — which is why a system that separates “machine restored” from “report finished” can measure it honestly.
Availability
The proportion of time equipment is able to run. It depends on how the obligation was defined, so a figure without its definition is not a figure.
Downtime
Time equipment is not able to run. Splitting it into waiting for parts, waiting for production access and actual repair time is what makes it actionable.
OEE — overall equipment effectiveness
Availability × performance × quality, a production measure. UR Maintain does not calculate OEE and shows no such figure — it is not a production reporting system, and a decorative number would be worse than none.
Failure mode and cause
The way a failure occurs, and why. Recorded by the person who was there. UR Maintain never invents a cause to make a report or a migration look complete.
Criticality
A plant's own 1–5 judgement of how much a machine matters. UR Maintain stores it as a number and reads it back in words — Lowest, Low, Medium, High, Highest, the plain ordinal reading of the scale. It deliberately does not invent severity names like “critical” or “serious”, because that would put a grading scheme in your plant's mouth.
RCM, FMEA, FMECA
Structured reliability methods for deciding what maintenance is worth doing. UR Maintain supports the history such studies are built from; it is not a reliability-modelling tool.
MACHINES AND ASSET DATA
What a machine's record holds, and what it means when a field is empty.
A field nobody has filled in is a fact about your plant, not a gap in the software.
Asset (machine)
The equipment being maintained. The application's screens say machine; the data model calls it an asset. Both mean the same record.
Asset tag
Your plant's own identifier for a machine — the one already written on the machine. A data import never changes it: a file carrying a different tag is describing a different machine.
Asset hierarchy
Machines, assemblies and components, and the locations they stand in — so a failure can be recorded against the part that failed inside the machine that stopped.
QR sticker
A label on the machine that opens its record. It replaces typing a tag with a phone that is already in the technician's hand.
“Not recorded”
What UR Maintain prints for a field nobody has filled in — maker, model, serial number or criticality. An explicit “not recorded” is more useful than an empty space, because it is honest about the difference between unknown and zero.
Location
Where a machine stands — an area, line, cell or room. Location and site are not the same thing; knowing which plant a machine is in is a permission boundary.
Running / operational
The machine's own state, reported from the field. It is deliberately separate from the state of the job about it.
PARTS AND STOCK
Words that decide whether a stock figure is real.
The distinction between a promise and a consumption is where most stock figures in maintenance start drifting.
Part number
Your plant's own identifier for a part. Like an asset tag, an import never changes it.
On hand
What is physically in the bin. It changes only by posting a movement — never by editing a number.
Available
On hand minus active reservations. This is the figure a technician should be shown when asking “can I take one?”.
Reservation
A promise of stock against a job. It is not consumption: reserving a part does not reduce what is on the shelf, and the system shows it as a promise rather than as used stock.
Issue and return
Stock leaving the storeroom for work, and stock coming back. Both are movements with an actor and a time, not edits to a total.
Adjustment and count adjustment
Correcting stock when reality and the record disagree. It requires a reason, because an unexplained adjustment is indistinguishable from a loss.
Scrap
Removing stock permanently because it can no longer be used. Distinct from an adjustment, and distinct from a return.
Ledger
The append-only list of movements. Balances are a projection the database checks against the ledger, which is what makes two people issuing the last unit resolve to one winner instead of a negative shelf.
Min / max
The reorder band for a part. A minimum is a trigger to act, not a law — and a system that silently blocks work because stock is low is a system people work around.
PLANNING AND PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE
How recurring work is defined and where it comes from.
The point of a plan history is that last month's job still says which plan produced it.
PM plan
A definition of recurring work: which machines, what work, and how often.
Recurrence rule
The schedule expressed as a real calendar rule rather than an interval — for example every two weeks on Monday and Wednesday at 06:00. It is evaluated in the plan's own time zone, so a 06:00 plan stays at 06:00 across a clock change.
Occurrence
One dated point at which a plan is due. The same plan and the same occurrence can only ever produce one work order.
Generation ledger
The record of which occurrences produced which work orders. It is why generation is safe to retry, and why two schedulers racing produce one job rather than two.
Plan revision
Editing a plan creates a new revision. A job generated last month still names the revision it actually came from — the alternative is a history that quietly rewrites itself.
DOCUMENTS
One record, many revisions.
Replacing a drawing must never destroy the drawing that was in force last year.
Document
The logical record: its number, title, type and site. It is what you search for and what is linked to a machine.
Revision (version)
One uploaded file. Revisions are immutable: uploading a replacement creates a new one, and the old ones stay readable exactly as they were.
Current revision
The one the plant has issued for use. It is a pointer held by the document, not simply “the newest file” — which is what makes it meaningful.
Archive vs delete
Archiving takes a document out of use while keeping it; deleting is soft, with a recovery window the system reports rather than hides.
OCR
Reading text out of a scanned drawing so it can be searched. Not built yet — see the product status page. Today documents are found by their number or title.
DEPLOYMENT, DATA AND SECURITY
Words a security review will use.
The security page covers the mechanisms; these are the terms.
Plant (organisation / tenant)
One customer's own separated data. The screens say plant; databases and contracts may say tenant. Two plants never see each other's rows.
Site scope
Which of a plant's sites a person may reach. It is applied on the server, so it is a limit rather than a label on a menu.
Row-level security
PostgreSQL's own mechanism for restricting which rows a query may see. UR Maintain enforces isolation here — in the database, under a role that cannot bypass it — rather than relying on every query remembering to filter.
Capability
A named permission such as work_order.take. A screen is told what the caller may do instead of guessing from a role name.
Idempotency
Sending the same request twice has one effect. It is what makes a retry over a flaky shop-floor connection safe.
Optimistic concurrency (row version)
Saving an edit together with the version of the record you opened. If someone else changed it first, the save is refused rather than silently overwriting their work.
Outbox
The queue of changes made on a device while it had no network, waiting to be pushed. Every entry is idempotent, so an interrupted push resumes instead of duplicating.
Cold start
Opening the application with no network at all. Not supported yet — offline capture works, offline start does not.
Audit log
A tamper-resistant record of who did what. Not built. Where a movement must be provable, the immutable ledger row is the evidence.
Export
Taking your data out. Not built yet, and stated as such rather than offered as a button that does nothing.
Managed cloud vs self-hosted
The same application and the same data model, run either on infrastructure we manage or on infrastructure your organisation controls.
MISSING A TERM?
If your plant says it differently, tell us.
Vocabulary from a real maintenance department is worth more than vocabulary invented by a software vendor.