Building the periodic inspection schedule for your equipment base

In most industrial SMEs, the periodic inspection schedule does exist. It lives in a spreadsheet, on a wall planner, or in the maintenance manager's head — often all three, with dates that do not quite match.

That works as long as nothing changes. Then a forklift truck is replaced, an inspection body changes its slot, the manager goes on holiday at the wrong moment, and a deadline slips by. It never flags itself: you find out on the day of the audit or, worse, on the day of the accident.

What follows is not yet another regulatory reminder: it is a construction method, in five steps, that can be applied in half a day for an equipment base of typical size. The table of the most common inspection intervals is at the end of the article, with the French regulatory texts that set them.

Why deadlines fall through the cracks

Three causes keep coming up, and none of them is negligence.

The schedule is tied to a person, not to the equipment. As long as the same person has been ordering the inspections for ten years, all is well. The day that person is absent, or replaced, the information leaves with them.

The starting point is unclear. A twelve-month interval is counted from what? From commissioning, from the last inspection, or from the date of the report? Depending on the answer, two people will calculate two different deadlines for the same machine.

The proof is not in the same place as the date. The date is in a spreadsheet, the report is in a mailbox or a binder. The day a third party asks for proof, you find the date in ten seconds and the document in two hours.

Step 1 — The inventory, and nothing else

Before any regulatory consideration, you need the list. Not a perfect list: an exhaustive list of the equipment likely to be subject to inspection.

Walk round the premises with a notebook and, for each item, record its type, its location, its serial or asset number, and its year of commissioning if it is legible. Do not try to classify as you go — that is what makes people give up on the exercise after an hour.

Two classic pitfalls. Hired and borrowed equipment is frequently forgotten, even though it is used on your premises. And reserve equipment — the back-up forklift, the rarely used aerial work platform — remains subject to the same obligations as soon as it is put into service, even occasionally.

Step 2 — The applicable text

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that gives the schedule its value. For each family of equipment, identify the text that sets the obligation, and note its reference next to the line.

Why note it? Because a schedule without references cannot be defended. The day someone asks why this machine is inspected every six months and that one every twelve, the answer must be a line of regulation, not a memory.

This step has a second, even more useful effect: it reveals the equipment for which no regulatory obligation exists, but where a professional recommendation or a manufacturer's instruction applies. Storage racking is the textbook example. Treating it as a regulatory obligation is a mistake; not inspecting it at all is another.

Step 3 — The frequency and the starting point

The frequency follows from the text. The starting point, however, must be decided and written down once and for all.

The most robust rule, because it does not drift: the next deadline is calculated from the date of the previous inspection, not from the date of the report or of the invoice. A report written three weeks after the visit does not push back the deadline.

Always add an alert date, separate from the due date. Six weeks ahead for an inspection by an external body — the time needed to book an appointment, which is often the real binding constraint. Two weeks for an internal inspection.

It is this alert date that does all the work. A deadline known six weeks in advance is a task; a deadline discovered on the day is a problem.

Step 4 — A named person, not a department

Every line in the schedule carries a name. Not “maintenance”, not “facilities”: a name.

This is not about blame, it is about mechanics. A task assigned to a department is assigned to nobody, and an alert sent to a department is read by nobody. The named owner is not necessarily the person who carries out the inspection — it is the person who makes sure it is ordered and carried out on time.

Plan for a deputy as well. The summer holidays account for a significant share of missed deadlines, for the simplest reason of all: the person who should have dealt with it was not there, and nobody knew they should have been dealing with it.

Step 5 — Proof, from day one

For a third party, an inspection whose report cannot be found is the same as an inspection that never took place. The rule is therefore simple: the date and the document live in the same place.

In practice, each line of the schedule must point to the corresponding report, and that link must be created when the report arrives — not during a quarterly tidy-up that will never happen.

Also keep a record of observations that have been cleared. A report with observations is only worth something if you can show what was corrected, when, and by whom. This is very often the missing link during an official check: the report is there, but the evidence that the observation was cleared cannot be found.

The most common inspection intervals

The table below brings together the most frequent cases in an industrial SME, with the French text that sets each one (the arrêtés are French ministerial orders; we give their official titles). It shows the usual intervals and is no substitute for reading the text applicable to your equipment: several of these categories include special cases that change the interval.

The last line deserves a closer look, because it illustrates the opposite trap to the one people fear. Racking is not subject to a regulatory general periodic inspection, and yet its failure is one of the most serious accident scenarios in a warehouse. No obligation does not mean no risk — and a well-built schedule distinguishes between the two instead of confusing them.

An inspection schedule is not there to prove that you are compliant. It is there to make sure you still are next month, without having to think about it.

Spreadsheet or software?

A spreadsheet does the job perfectly well for a small, stable equipment base kept by a single person. It stops being enough when three conditions come together: the equipment base grows, several people need to update it, and proof has to be produced quickly at a third party's request.

So the tipping point is not the number of pieces of equipment, contrary to what people assume: it is the number of people who need to consult and update the tracking. A spreadsheet shared between three people always ends up in three versions.

That is the job Rotor-FSM does: configurable equipment records, deadlines carried by the equipment rather than by a person, alerts before the due date, and a branded PDF report attached to the line that triggered it. If your maintenance is still mostly corrective, however, the order of priorities is different — we explain this in why a CMMS fails in a corrective culture, and in the preventive/corrective ratio.