While physical verification is the primary objective of an asset audit, it also helps assess the condition of assets and evaluate how they’re being managed and maintained.
However, audits often get messy. It’s easy to get carried away spending too much time on matters outside the scope of the audit or waste time searching for documents after the audit has started.
You need a structured methodology to avoid these pitfalls, and that’s where this guide can help. Below, we'll help you become audit-ready with a step-by-step guide on running an effective asset audit.
Key Takeaways
- Asset audits rely heavily on data. Records form the basis of your audit. Before you start, ensure you have an organized data repository you can access quickly.
- A structured audit process is critical. You can easily get buried in data or lose sight of your scope. Following a clear process keeps you focused.
- Reporting findings isn't the last step. Following up on recommendations and ensuring your team executes them to completion is critical to your audit's success.
- Leverage technology to streamline the audit process. A CMMS can reduce time spent on data collection and organization, offering real-time visibility and improving audit efficiency.
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Set clear audit objectives
Start by identifying the reasons for auditing your company’s assets. For example, you might want to examine your maintenance program's effectiveness if you've recently seen repair costs increase.
When thinking about your objectives, keep these points in mind:
- Tie them directly to a business goal, such as reducing downtime or improving safety compliance.
- Be specific and measurable about your goals so you can assess the current situation and track progress when your team takes corrective actions.
Imagine your manufacturing plant has been experiencing equipment failures in one of its bottleneck production lines, leading to downtime and missed delivery deadlines.
Your asset audit objective could be to "evaluate the maintenance effectiveness and asset lifecycle health of production equipment on Line 3 to identify root causes of unplanned downtime and recommend corrective actions to improve availability by at least 15% within the next quarter."
Notice how this objective tells you:
- What to focus on: Critical assets on Line 3
- Why you’re auditing: High unplanned downtime
- What success looks like: 15% improvement in availability
Define the scope and assets to audit
Answer these questions to define your scope:
- Where are the assets located?
- Which assets are you auditing?
- What exactly are you auditing about them?
In our example, you might define the scope of the audit like this:
- Location: Production Line 3 at Plant A
- Assets: Top 10 most failure-prone machines on the line—includes rotary fillers, conveyors, cooling systems, and the main labeling machine
- Focus of audit: Asset register accuracy (tag, location, model number, service date), preventive maintenance history and compliance rates, frequency and causes of reactive maintenance, and technician feedback on recurring issues
- Excluded from scope: Non-production assets (like forklifts and HVAC) and non-critical backup equipment in storage
Being specific about your audit scope helps avoid audit fatigue by focusing on high-value assets. It also generates actionable insights faster because you’re not buried in data on low-impact equipment, and it creates a repeatable audit model.
Gather required documentation, including asset value
If you play your cards right, you give your audit momentum, but there’s also the risk of getting bogged down in data clutter.
Picture this. When gathering documentation before auditing Line 3’s rotary filler, the maintenance manager sends you a ton of data that includes three years of work orders (2,000+ entries), vendor manuals for every component (including parts that were swapped out years ago), and a folder titled “Line 3 - Do Not Delete” with 82 files and no naming convention.
See the problem? That’s why you need to be selective when gathering documentation based on the scope you defined earlier. The goal is to build a complete, reliable picture of assets you’re auditing by creating an “evidence kit.” Collect the following data:
- Asset documentation
- Asset register entries for each machine, including make, model, and serial number
- Installation and commission dates
- Warranty status and service agreements
- Bill of materials (BOMs)
- Maintenance records
- Preventive maintenance (PM) schedules and completion logs
- Predictive maintenance (PdM) data (such as vibration analysis reports and thermography)
- Work order history
- Unplanned downtime incident data, including root cause reports, failure logs, and corrective actions
- Spare parts data
- Parts usage trends and reorder frequency
- Stockouts or lead time issues tied to failures
- Cost data (especially for recurring replacements)
- Operational data
- Equipment uptime/downtime logs
- Run-time hours and duty cycle (especially for high-load machines)
- Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) or availability metrics (if tracked)
- Safety and regulatory compliance records
- Safety inspections
- Lockout tagout reports
- Calibration and regulatory certifications
Let’s say you’re reviewing a rotary filler that’s gone down four times in three months. You’d need:
- The PM checklist timestamps to see if your team completed lubrication
- Work order history showcasing repeated failures due to a faulty actuator
- Technician notes highlighting that the actuator keeps failing under load
What you wouldn’t need:
- Operator shift schedules for the past two years
- Energy consumption trends for the full production line
- Maintenance logs from an identical filler on another line
Pro tip: Collecting all of this data is labor-intensive, let alone gathering it quickly before an audit. Physical asset records can take days or even weeks to compile. That’s why you need a cloud-based computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) that automatically collects much of this data and stores it digitally. This gives you easy access to digital, searchable data and helps streamline operations.
Physically verify assets for your asset audit
This is where you physically go to the shop floor for verification.
The goal? To confirm what’s actually on the plant floor, how it’s performing, and whether the data in the system matches the data in your asset management software and financial reports.
Check for the following during physical verification:
- Asset presence and tagging
- Does the asset exist where the register says it should?
- Is it tagged correctly (asset ID, nameplate, QR/barcode)?
- Has it been swapped or relocated without recording?
- Physical condition
- Signs of wear, leaks, corrosion, and misalignment
- Safety hazards (missing guards, jury-rigged fixes)
- Cleanliness and housekeeping (cluttered equipment tends to break more often)
- Installed components
- Verify major components match BOM and historical records
- Check for aftermarket, non-OEM parts that may affect performance
- Usage environment
- Is the asset exposed to dust, moisture, vibration, or temperature extremes not accounted for in PM schedules?
- Ask operators, “How often does this break down? What’s the usual issue? Has it gotten worse?”
Let’s say the rotary filler you’re inspecting has a known downtime history. Physical verification may reveal one or more of the following problems:
- The asset tag is missing, and an incorrect serial number is listed in your records.
- The actuator shows visible oil seepage, but no PM logs mention checking it.
- A handwritten maintenance note is taped to the side: “Actuator buzzes under load, so it was swapped out with a spare last week.”
- The environment is hot and humid, and no one has checked the calibration in eight months.
Analyze maintenance practices and identify other issues
Suppose your physical inspection of the rotary filler and nine other assets on Line 3 shows various problems, including missing asset tags, recurring actuator failures, poor documentation, and mismatches between data and physical reality.
It’s now time to extract insights and decide on a course of action.
Start by analyzing your maintenance practices. Ask the following questions:
- Is your team performing PMs on time and as per OEM spec?
- Are you fixing the same issues over and over?
- Is the team more reactive than preventive?
- Are your technicians logging breakdowns with proper root cause analysis?
- Are spares available when needed, or are delays increasing downtime?
At the same time, look for issues beyond maintenance. Here are examples of issues to watch for:
- Process gaps: Missing PM tasks and inconsistent work order documentation
- Data gaps: Outdated or missing asset data (such as incorrect purchase price, asset valuation, or depreciation amounts in financial statements), no standard failure codes, and ghost assets
- Training gaps: Techs improvising fixes without guidance and failing to comply with internal controls
- Inventory gaps: Poor parts or asset tracking, no minimum/maximum levels, and no integration with your CMMS
In our example, here’s what you might conclude after analyzing maintenance practices and looking for other issues:
- Your team marks PMs for the rotary filler “complete,” but no actuator inspection is on the checklist.
- Your technicians report the same failure each month, but no one documents corrective actions.
- The lack of asset tagging and discrepancies in records poses a compliance and traceability risk.
- Delayed part availability creates a maintenance bottleneck, increasing cost and reducing the asset utilization rate.
Report findings with actionable recommendations
It’s time to package the audit’s findings into a report for stakeholders. Here’s what you need to add to the audit report to make it thorough:
- Executive summary: Keep it short and sharp, and include:
- What you audited
- Why it mattered
- Key findings and a visual dashboard of key metrics on your CMMS
- Quick-win recommendations
- Objective and scope recap: Reiterate your objective and boundary lines to give stakeholders context. For example, you could say, “The audit covered the 10 highest-failure assets on Line 3 at Plant A to identify reliability improvements and increase availability by 15%.”
- Detailed findings: Share your evidence, including an asset-by-asset summary, photos of issues (such as a leaking actuator and missing tag), proof of poorly kept records, and quotes from operators or technicians if relevant.
- Gap and risk analysis: This part requires some discretion in framing the content. As a rule of thumb, offer specific information and prioritize areas that matter to stakeholders, such as production delays, compliance exposure, cost of reactive repairs, and safety implications. For example, you could say, “Failure to inspect actuators is contributing to monthly unplanned downtime, estimated at $14,000/month in lost throughput.”
- Recommendations: Lay them out in a table or bullet format, with details on what to do, who should do it, by when, and the expected benefit. Here’s an example:
Take action
An asset audit is useless without action. After the audit report is ready, take the recommendations and break them into:
- What needs to be done
- Who owns it
- When it should happen
- How you’ll track it
Create a checklist of actions you need to perform based on audit recommendations. Assign it to technicians and set a reasonable deadline. As your technicians perform those actions, track their progress.
If you use a CMMS, you can set up a dashboard and project module to monitor:
- Which actions are complete, in progress, or stalled
- Who’s responsible for each
- Estimated vs. actual timelines
Put someone in charge of tracking progress and reporting it to stakeholders, and instruct them to connect technicians to the relevant team member if more issues are discovered when performing corrective actions.
Tracking progress should be easy with a CMMS. It gives you a real-time view of actions that are due and overdue on your checklist. On MaintainX, you can even reach out to technicians to follow up on overdue tasks using the built-in chat function.
Simplify asset audits with a CMMS
Let’s face it. Asset audits are rarely easy. Between locating asset records, coordinating across teams, verifying physical assets, documenting findings, and tracking follow-up actions, it’s a lot. And if you’re still using spreadsheets or paper logs, you’re just making life harder.
That’s where MaintainX comes in.
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