Preventive Maintenance Checklist: A Programme, Not a Service
Preventive maintenance is not a longer service. It is a schedule of small, cheap, boring interventions that stop expensive ones happening. This checklist is organised by interval rather than by component, because the hard part of PM is never knowing what to check. It is getting the vehicle into the bay on the day it was due.
Every fleet already has a preventive maintenance programme. Most of them have it in the form of a spreadsheet that was accurate in March. The intervals are in there, the vehicles are in there, and somewhere around week nine a truck was on a job when its service came up, the booking moved, nobody moved the next one, and the schedule quietly detached from reality. Nothing broke that week, which is exactly why nobody noticed.
That is the failure mode this checklist is aimed at. The tasks below are not difficult and no experienced fleet engineer will find them surprising. The value is in the last section, which is about the programme itself: who owns the schedule, what happens when a vehicle misses its slot, and how you find out that it did.
Organise your own version the same way, by interval, with the owner named on each block. Daily items belong to the driver and cost seconds. Annual items belong to the workshop and cost a day off the road. Mixing them on one sheet is how daily items end up being done annually.
41 checks across 6 sections
Setting the intervals
- Start from the manufacturer's schedule, then adjust it against your own failure history rather than against a number someone remembers from a previous employer.
- Choose the right meter for each vehicle. Distance suits long-haul; engine hours suit plant, tippers and anything that idles for a living; calendar time suits low-use vehicles where fluids age faster than they are used.
- Set the interval on whichever meter arrives first, and make sure your system can actually enforce two meters at once.
- Shorten intervals for vehicles on severe duty: stop-start delivery, dust, heat, heavy loads, short journeys that never reach operating temperature.
- Write down why each interval is what it is. An interval with no stated reason gets changed by the next person to hold the job, in the wrong direction.
- Review intervals against unplanned failures once a year. A component that keeps failing before its interval is telling you the interval is wrong.
Daily — driver level
- Check engine oil and coolant level before first start, when the vehicle has been standing and the reading means something.
- Walk the vehicle and look at the tyres for obvious deflation, damage and anything embedded in the tread.
- Test lights and indicators with a second person or a wall, and report a failed lamp the same shift rather than at the end of the week.
- Listen to the vehicle for the first minute of running, because a new noise is the cheapest diagnostic signal in the fleet.
- Report any warning lamp that stays on after start, including the ones that have been on for a month.
- Note anything that changed since yesterday, such as a new vibration, a longer brake pedal or a pull under braking, in words rather than in a tick box.
Weekly — yard or supervisor level
- Check and set tyre pressures cold across the whole vehicle including the inner duals, which is where slow punctures hide.
- Check screenwash and top up before it runs out rather than after a driver reports it.
- Inspect wiper blades by running them on a wet screen, not by looking at them.
- Drain the air tanks on air-braked vehicles and note excessive water.
- Check the load area, tail lift and restraint equipment for damage that a driver would report only if it stopped them working.
- Clean the number plates, lamp lenses and camera or sensor faces, because a dirty sensor is an unreliable sensor.
- Review the week's open driver defects and close or schedule every one of them.
Monthly — light workshop
- Grease every point on the chart, and confirm the chart matches the vehicle rather than the one it replaced.
- Check battery terminals and load-test any battery over three years old.
- Inspect belts, hoses and clips for cracking, softening and chafe where they pass a bracket.
- Check brake pad and lining thickness through the wheel where accessible, and book a full inspection for anything approaching its limit.
- Inspect exhaust and emissions plumbing for leaks and for the AdBlue crystallisation that precedes a dosing fault.
- Check the telematics unit and any fuel probe are reporting, and investigate a silent device as a fault rather than as no news.
- Rotate or reposition tyres where your wear pattern justifies it, and record which position each tyre moved to.
Quarterly and annual — full workshop
- Change engine oil and filter on the interval you set, and send a sample for analysis on high-value engines rather than only looking at the drain.
- Replace fuel, air and cabin filters against interval or measured restriction, whichever your standard specifies.
- Perform a full brake inspection with wheels off, including caliper slides, hoses and the parking brake mechanism.
- Change transmission and axle oils on the manufacturer's schedule, adjusted for duty cycle rather than ignored because they are expensive.
- Flush and replace coolant on the specified interval, testing the old coolant before you discard the evidence.
- Check wheel alignment on any vehicle showing shoulder wear, and check it on the tractor before blaming the trailer.
- Renew safety-critical rubber that has timed out rather than worn out: hoses, air lines, and tyres on low-mileage assets.
- Book statutory inspections, calibrations and certifications far enough ahead that they do not become an off-road emergency.
Running the programme
- Name one owner for the schedule. A schedule owned by everyone is a schedule owned by nobody, and it decays within a quarter.
- Book the next service at the moment the current one closes, using the odometer that just came off the vehicle.
- Forecast the due date from each vehicle's actual usage rate, not from an assumed monthly average. The vehicle doing double its planned distance will arrive at its interval early and nobody will notice.
- Track PM compliance as a number: services due against services completed on time, per depot. It is the only metric that tells you whether the programme exists.
- Make a missed slot generate a visible exception rather than a silent reschedule.
- Keep a small buffer of workshop capacity for unplanned work. A bay plan that is full absorbs every breakdown by cancelling preventive work, which produces more breakdowns.
- Review the ratio of planned to unplanned work each quarter. If unplanned work is rising, the programme is losing, whatever the compliance number says.
How to use this checklist
- Assign each interval block to a named role before you print anything. The daily block belongs to whoever holds the keys; the annual block belongs to whoever books the bay. Unassigned blocks are aspirational.
- Build the schedule around your busiest period, not your quietest. Any programme survives a slow month. The one worth having is the one that still runs when every vehicle is committed.
- Do not let the daily block grow. Every item added to a driver's morning is paid for by less attention on the items already there, and a fifteen-item driver check gets done as a five-item driver check.
- Measure compliance monthly and publish it by depot. Preventive maintenance decays quietly, and the only defence is a number somebody has to explain.
Frequently asked questions
Preventive maintenance acts on a schedule: the interval arrives, the work happens, whether or not the component needed it. Predictive maintenance acts on a condition signal such as oil analysis, vibration, a consumption trend or a fault code pattern, and does the work when the evidence says it is needed. Predictive is more efficient in theory and needs data most fleets do not yet have in practice. Nearly every fleet should get a preventive programme running properly before spending anything on prediction.
On whichever meter reflects the wear. A motorway tractor accumulates kilometres with the engine barely working; a tipper on a site spends its day at high load and low speed and will destroy an engine long before the odometer suggests. Plant, refuse vehicles and anything with a PTO should run on hours. Long-haul runs on distance. Vehicles that do both need both meters, with the service triggered by whichever arrives first, and a low-use vehicle also needs a calendar trigger because oil degrades whether or not it is used.
That is a scheduling problem, not a maintenance problem, and pretending otherwise is how fleets end up managing breakdowns instead. Two things help. First, forecast due dates from usage rather than dates, so you can see a service coming weeks out and plan the vehicle out of the roster rather than pulling it out. Second, count the cost of the unplanned failures the deferrals are producing. A workshop slot is cheap and predictable. A roadside recovery on a Friday afternoon is neither.
Directionally yes, and we are not going to give you a figure, because the honest answer is that it depends entirely on what your unplanned failures currently cost you. A fleet with reliable vehicles and cheap downtime gains little from tighter intervals. A fleet where a breakdown strands a load, misses a delivery window and burns a recovery callout gains a great deal. Work out your own downtime cost first. That number, not a benchmark from a website, tells you how much preventive work is worth buying.
Stop maintaining it by hand. A spreadsheet has to be updated by a person who remembers to, and that person is the single point of failure in most PM programmes. When the schedule reads odometer and engine hours straight off the vehicle, the due date recalculates itself as usage changes, and a slipped booking raises an overdue exception instead of vanishing. The Maintenance and Service module exists for exactly this: not to decide the intervals, which are your engineering judgement, but to make sure the ones you set are the ones that happen.
Run this checklist automatically
Fleet Maintenance Software turns these checks into scheduled, assignable work with a full audit trail.