Service by Running Hours, Not by the Date: Meters, Reading Rounds, and Inventory

A monthly service on a compressor that ran 400 hours this month is late. The same monthly service on the one that ran 150 hours is early. The calendar cannot tell the difference, and for a long time neither could maintenance software. Three capabilities now live in Smart Maintenance Task Manager close that gap: maintenance driven by what a machine has actually done, scheduled reading rounds that keep the counters read, and stock that moves when the work is done.

Service by running hours, not by the date

A machine can now carry one or more meters: running hours, distance, cycles, or a custom unit of your own. A maintenance rule is then tied to the meter instead of the calendar — “service every 250 running hours” — and the system creates the task when the reading crosses the interval, not on a fixed day. Calendar schedules stay exactly where they were for everything that does wear by time.

The reading comes from the floor. A scheduled reading round walks the technician from counter to counter in the order you set — one job for a whole line, or for every truck in a fleet — and a technician doing any other task at a metered machine can add the reading while standing there. Both work offline and sync like everything else; there is no clipboard to transcribe later. Planners see a projected next-due date for every rule, computed from how fast the meter is really moving, so the next service is visible before the reading gets there. A copied or moved machine keeps its meters, and a counter nobody has read for longer than its tolerance is named to the people who plan and assign the work — with the technician’s own reason when it was skipped at the machine — so a projection built on an old number is caught before it misleads a schedule.

The counter gets read on a scheduled round, not by nagging the crew

Usage-based intervals are only as good as the readings behind them, so readings are collected by a meter reading task: a planner lists the counters to read — one machine, or a whole line in walking order — and schedules it like any other job, daily, weekly, monthly, or several times a day. One reading task can cover up to sixty counters across as many machines as the walk takes in, so a whole line’s counters are one job on the technician’s phone, taken in the order they are walked. A reading taken during any other job at that machine — or typed into the portal — closes that day’s single-counter reading task on its own, so nobody is sent back to a display that was read this morning. A round stays open until every counter on it has an answer.

• Reading tasks appear in the technician’s inbox like any other task.
• A missed reading round is reported once, in a daily digest to the people who can act on it — those who manage the counters or assign the work — naming the task, the machine, how long it is overdue and who it was assigned to, or that nobody was.
• A reading round cannot be closed on a blank: every counter needs a value, a note that the machine was idle, or a reason the display could not be read. A round that was closed with every counter unread is named in the next digest, so a crew that starts skipping is seen the first time, not after a month of empty numbers.

Stock that moves when the work is done

Lubricants and consumables are the one part of maintenance that spreadsheets never keep straight, because the number changes on the floor and the spreadsheet lives in the office. The new Inventory module books consumption from the task itself: when a technician records the quantity used on a lubrication task, the stock balance moves. No separate data entry, no reconciliation at month end.

• Hold stock as one inventory for the whole company, or one per production site — your choice.
• Receipts, adjustments, and transfers between sites are all recorded.
• Every movement sits in an auditable ledger, and the balance can always be rebuilt from it.
• A low-stock alert fires when a balance crosses its reorder point, and re-arms after the next receipt.

Two things worth saying plainly. Inventory is an optional module that Pegotec enables per customer — everything else on this page is included in every subscription, and this is the one add-on. And it does not do purchasing: there are no purchase orders, order lists, or supplier records. It tracks what is on the shelf and what the work consumed, and tells you when to reorder.

Proven on a mining fleet, not just fixed plant

Meters were built for equipment that moves. A mining fleet register is now live on Smart Maintenance Task Manager with per-unit assets for haul trucks, excavators, loaders, and drills — each carrying its own hour, kilometre, and tonnage meters, each with staggered service rules. A fleet-wide average hides exactly the unit that is about to fail; forty trucks as forty assets, each with its own projected next-due date, shows it. That is why Mining now has its own page alongside manufacturing, food & beverage, textiles, chemical processing, automotive, and pharmaceutical.

Where to find it

Usage-based maintenance and scheduled reading rounds are described on the Scheduling page; the ledger, low-stock alerts, and the missed- and stale-reading digests are on the Reporting page; and the Mobile App page covers reading counters in the field. To see any of it running against your own equipment list, book a demo.