What an auditor actually looks at in your planned maintenance
CrewSmart's planned maintenance system is DNV type-approved, so the structure an auditor expects to find has already been examined in detail. The rest of what follows comes from our customers: what they tell us after flag, class, ISM, charterer vetting and internal audits is remarkably consistent. The schedule is rarely the problem. What auditors probe is whether the schedule reflects reality and whether the history proves it.
1. Is the framework complete?
The first check is whether the equipment on the vessel is in the system. An engine with no inventory record cannot have maintenance tasks against it, so the tasks never fire, so there is no history. Missing-item reports exist for exactly this reason: start there, and prioritise the items that have work tasks assigned.
2. Do the tasks match the maker's intervals?
For each major item the auditor will pick a task and ask where the interval came from. "The manual says 250 hours" is a good answer. "It has always been 300" is not. Work instructions that reference the source document, and counters that actually record running hours, make this a thirty-second conversation.
3. What happened to the deferred ones?
Every fleet defers maintenance. Auditors do not object to deferral; they object to deferral without a reason, an authority and a new date. A task deferred three times with no note is a finding. A task deferred once with a note along the lines of "awaiting part, PO raised, revised date 14 June, approved by the technical superintendent" is evidence of a working system.
4. Can you show me the history for this item?
This is the one that separates a maintenance system from a maintenance plan. Pick a pump: who serviced it, when, what they found, what the counter read, what parts were used, whether a defect was raised. If the answer is a continuous record on screen, the rest of the audit tends to go quickly. If it is a ring binder on the vessel, it does not.
5. What about the things that broke between services?
Defects are maintenance too. The auditor will want to see that a failure on deck became a defect, that the defect became an action with an owner, and that closing the action updated the equipment history. The link between the three is what they are looking for; three separate lists do not demonstrate it.
6. Who did the work, and were they competent to?
Increasingly, the question extends to the person. Was the engineer who signed off the fuel system service qualified and in date? A maintenance record that links to the crew record answers this without anyone leaving the room.
What this means for a smaller fleet
None of the above requires a large technical department. It requires the record to be created at the point of work, on the vessel, by the person doing it, and for the office to see the same record. That is the design principle behind CrewSmart's PMS and the onboard app, and it is why the type approval matters: the structure the auditor expects is already there.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on your maintenance records before your next audit, get in touch.
