This article walks through preventive maintenance in Spare EAM end to end — defining service tasks, building service programs and schedules, linking assets, and turning due services into work orders your team completes. Watch the walkthrough, then use the sections below as a reference.
1. Define your service tasks
Service tasks are the building blocks of preventive maintenance — individual jobs like an oil change, brake inspection, or transmission service. Manage them under Settings → Service Tasks. Each task has a name, an optional time estimate in minutes, a type (maintenance, inspection, or repair), and optional VMRS codes for reporting.
2. Build service programs and schedules
Service programs are how Spare EAM represents preventive maintenance programs. Under Settings → Service Programs, each program contains service schedules (for example 3K, 20K, 30K, 60K, and 100K mile services), and the matrix shows which service tasks are performed at each schedule — click to add or remove tasks.
Click Manage Schedules to set each schedule's interval, due soon threshold, and overdue threshold. Intervals can be meter-based, time-based, or both. For example, a 3,000-mile schedule with a 600-mile due-soon threshold and a 300-mile overdue threshold works like this for a vehicle starting from zero:
0 – 2,400 miles: Upcoming
2,400 – 3,000 miles: Due Soon
3,000 – 3,300 miles: Due
Past 3,300 miles: Overdue
3. Link your assets and set initial values
At the bottom of the service program, link the assets the program applies to. For each linked asset, use the row menu to set its fallback values — the date and meter reading of the last time each schedule was serviced before the asset joined Spare — so PM schedules don't start from zero.
Getting these right matters: they determine when your next PMs come due. See Fallback Service Values & Initial PM Values for the details, including what happens when no fallback value is set.
This is a one-and-done setup — after launch you'll only come back to service programs for occasional tweaks.
4. Work the due list every day
Day to day, live in Maintenance → Service Reminders (or the asset's Scheduled Services tab): the Due Soon, Due, Overdue, and Upcoming tabs tell you exactly which vehicles need attention as meter entries come in.
When a service needs to happen, choose Add to Work Order → Add to New Work Order. Name it (for example "3K Service"), optionally assign a lead, set the category to preventive maintenance, and confirm the linked service schedule — the schedule's service tasks populate onto the work order automatically.
5. Complete the work
Mechanics work the order from Spare's mobile app for maintenance teams: checking off each task, adding parts and labor, and — if an inspection form is attached — starting the inspection right from the work order.
Completing the work order records the service in the asset's PM History and starts the clock on the next occurrence of the schedule. Related reading: Inspections in Spare EAM, Issues vs. Service Tasks, and Correcting Meter Entries (meter entries drive all of the due-soon math, so keeping them accurate matters).