Checklists and forms are an essential part of the maintenance and servicing of machines. Depending on the industry or system, they are even required by law and must be archived in an audit-proof manner. They also serve the purpose of occupational safety and ensure efficiency and quality.

In many industrial production companies, however, maintenance staff still use paper, pen and clipboard and fill out checklists and forms manually. This often results in illegible, incomplete or not at all completed paper documents, which are then scanned or manually transferred to the backend system. Audit compliance is not always guaranteed here.

Digital checklists in mobile maintenance offer an efficient alternative. They are part of a mobile app for maintenance. Companies can use them to create their individual forms and checklists centrally. Maintenance staff can fill these out quickly and easily on their mobile devices. The documents are then automatically archived in the backend system.

Three categories of checklists

In some industrial production companies, there are hundreds of different checklists and forms for different areas of application. However, almost all of them can be divided into three main areas:

Work preparation

Before maintenance technicians can start servicing and maintaining machines, they should use a checklist to compile all the necessary documents, tools and aids for their jobs. This may also include access authorizations for sensitive areas or permits as well as protective clothing and safety guidelines.

Execution of orders

During the actual inspection or maintenance of a system, a checklist helps the maintenance technician to carry out all the steps in the correct order.

Documentation of orders

Checklists that document maintenance measures and their results are particularly important. These include test and measurement logs, for example.

Digital checklists in mobile maintenance are more than just electronic versions of paper forms. They offer much broader application possibilities than their paper-based predecessors:

Individual and centralized creation

Companies can easily create their digital checklists and forms for a maintenance app in a browser-based text editor tailored to their own needs. They can choose between different types of input fields. Logos and a company's CI can also be easily mapped.

Mobile provision

Maintenance staff receive the checklists or forms they need for the job directly in their mobile app.

Use of backend data

When filling in the checklists, maintenance staff can access all the data available in the app. Contextual information such as order and system data can already be pre-assigned.

Process reliability

Digital checklists make a significant contribution in the area of occupational safety. They ensure, for example, that employees can only start maintenance on a particular machine or take the next step once they have read and confirmed the safety instructions.

Less susceptibility to errors

A validation system can already check the validity of the maintenance technician's data when filling out the digital checklists. There are common validators for mandatory fields, email addresses or value limits. Before the data is then posted in the backend system, it can be checked again.

Dynamic input

Digital checklists can be expanded dynamically depending on contextual information or input. For example, unexpected defects can also be documented.

Additional documentation with photos

In contrast to paper-based forms, the maintenance technician can record damage directly with the camera of their mobile device and attach it as a document.

Digital signatures

The maintenance technician or their supervisor can confirm the completion of a maintenance task on the smartphone or tablet with their signature.

Multilingual variants

Digital checklists and forms can be created and used in different language versions.

Audit-proof archiving

Once the maintenance technician has filled in and completed the digital checklist for the order, it is transferred directly to the backend system with the confirmation and saved there as a data record and optionally as a PDF document.

End-to-end digitalization of maintenance processes

In order to map an end-to-end digital process without media discontinuity, it is also necessary to digitize checklists. This is made possible by using a maintenance app with digital forms.

The future of digital checklists

Digitalization will continue to make day-to-day maintenance work easier over the next few years, thereby also optimizing system availability. For maintenance staff, voice input and voice control can already speed up the processing of checklists and orders on a mobile device.

With the additional use of AR and VR applications, it could even be possible in future to project checklists onto smart glasses so that maintenance staff can work through their checklist hands-free and simply dictate the results.

Hannes Heckner, CEO MobileX