The End of Lost Maintenance Data: A Unified PPM Approach with Maintain

The Challenge

Organisations that require building maintenance, especially those that hand over maintenance between different maintenance providers over time, often face several recurring problems:

1. Loss of historical maintenance data when maintenance providers change
   Every time a new maintenance company is introduced, a new system or process might be implemented resulting in maintenance history, asset records and job logs being lost or become difficult to access. Without a unified, long-term system, valuable data on past maintenance is effectively erased, undermining compliance, asset lifecycle tracking, and maintenance planning.
2. Over-reliance on spreadsheets or disparate systems
   Many maintenance teams depend on spreadsheets or simple, disjointed record-keeping methods. This often leads to confusion: overlapping schedules, unclear statuses, missed jobs, difficulty tracking periodic maintenance, and lack of clarity on what’s due or overdue.
3. Inflexible maintenance scheduling and poor visibility for reactive jobs
   When breakdowns, emergencies or one-off jobs occur, many static scheduling systems struggle to integrate them smoothly alongside regular preventive maintenance leading to lost jobs, poor tracking, or no clear assignment of responsibility.
4. Difficulty scaling across multiple sites, estates, or assets
   For organisations managing multiple buildings, estates, large portfolios of assets a simple spreadsheet or small system won’t scale. Maintenance data becomes fragmented, scheduling becomes cumbersome, and visibility across sites is limited.
5. Lack of clarity and transparency in maintenance history, job allocation, and reporting
   Without a centralised system it's hard to see what maintenance has been done, when, by whom and what remains due. This impairs asset-management quality, compliance (e.g. safety, warranty, servicing contracts), and long-term lifecycle planning.

Because of these issues, building owners, facility managers, or FM providers may struggle with inconsistent maintenance quality, compliance risks, difficulty proving maintenance history (for audits or insurers), higher risk of asset failure, and inefficiency.

The Solution: Maintain

By adopting Maintain as the organisation-wide PPM system, maintenance operations become unified, consistent, and future-proof. The key features and how they address the challenges:

1. Web-based, scalable PPM system with no software install needed
   Maintain is entirely online, so there’s no need for dedicated software, servers or heavy IT infrastructure. It works across estates, multiple sites or even for FM providers managing clients remotely.
2. Centralised asset record import and management
   Existing asset lists (e.g. from spreadsheets) can be imported using Maintain’s “Asset Importer,” avoiding the need to re-enter all data and ensuring a clean consolidated starting point whether the building is old or new.
3. Flexible scheduling with preventive and reactive maintenance support
   Users can define job schedules (from a built-in schedule library, custom templates, or edited schedules), set job periods and start dates, and let Maintain automatically schedule recurring maintenance. Reactive or breakdown jobs can also be logged and inserted alongside scheduled tasks.
4. Job ticketing, allocation, and engineer assignment by role or asset
   Maintenance tasks (scheduled or reactive) can be allocated to specific engineers or contractors, based on asset or role. When overlapping schedules coincide for the same asset, Maintain can merge them into one job ticket, simplifying task management and avoiding duplication or confusion.
5. Real-time, uncluttered reporting and visibility across sites/assets
   Maintain offers dynamic reporting and graphs covering completed work, upcoming scheduled jobs, breakdowns, and overdue tasks. Reports can be by individual site or multiple-site/estate view giving facility managers full visibility of maintenance status across the portfolio.
6. Long-term historical data retention and consistent record-keeping
   Because all maintenance, reactive jobs, asset records and history are stored in a central online system, data stays intact regardless of changes in maintenance provider. This ensures continuity, compliance, and a complete audit trail over the building’s life.

The Impact

Implementing Maintain delivers significant benefits across maintenance operations:

1. Preserved continuity of maintenance history, regardless of provider changes
   By centralising all asset and maintenance data, historical records are never lost delivering long-term traceability, compliance, and accountability.
2. Reduction in manual admin work removing spreadsheets and fragmented systems
   Maintenance teams avoid the inefficiency and risk associated with juggling spreadsheets, ad-hoc logs or paper-based records.
3. Improved scheduling reliability and reduced missed or overdue maintenance
   Automatic scheduling, merging overlapping jobs, reactive-job handling, and engineer allocation ensure tasks are not overlooked improving building safety, asset lifespan, and compliance.
4. Better resource allocation and clearer accountability
   With job ticketing and engineer assignment, it is clear who is responsible for each task, reducing ambiguity and improving service quality, whether in-house or via contractors.
5. Scalability: works for single buildings or large estates / multiple sites
   The same system can manage one building or dozens making it ideal for FM providers, property portfolios, or multi-site clients.
6. Transparency, real-time reporting, and data-driven decision making
   Managers and stakeholders gain visibility into maintenance history, upcoming work, contractor/in-house split, overdue tasks enabling proactive maintenance planning, long-term asset management, and cost control.
7. Compliance and reduced risk
   With scheduled maintenance, reactive maintenance traceability, and full records, the risk of missed safety checks, expired warranties or neglected statutory maintenance reduces significantly protecting building owners, tenants, and FM providers.

Conclusion

By adopting Maintain, organisations move from fragmented, disconnected maintenance processes often reliant on spreadsheets, ad-hoc methods or changing maintenance providers to a unified, scalable, online PPM system. Maintain preserves the history of assets and maintenance works, simplifies scheduling and job allocation, supports reactive maintenance, and delivers real-time visibility and robust reporting.

For building owners, facility managers, and property portfolio operators, this means more efficient maintenance, better compliance, longer asset life and peace of mind that maintenance history endures even as providers change giving a stable foundation for long-term facilities management.