Facility inspection, facility inspections and facility audits get used interchangeably and are not the same. One is a routine look at a thing on an interval. The second is the program of them across the building. The third is a formal exercise producing a documented finding, usually for somebody outside the maintenance team. Knowing which one is being asked for saves a great deal of wasted effort, because the outputs are different and only one of them is a budget.
The routine inspection
A scheduled look at an asset, run to an interval, recording readings and findings against that asset. It is maintenance work like any other and belongs on the same schedule, with the same rule that the next date derives from the last completion. Its value is entirely in what gets recorded: an inspection whose findings are not filed against the asset has cost the visit and produced nothing that can be asked a question later.
The inspection program across the building
Facility inspections in the plural usually means the coverage question: which assets are inspected, how often, and where the gaps are. The gaps are where surprises come from, and they are visible from the register rather than from the calendar. An asset with no interval on it is not being inspected, whatever anybody remembers, and listing those is normally the fastest useful hour a new manager can spend.
Facility audits, and the number that comes out of them
A facility audit is formal: a walked assessment of condition, system by system, with each deficiency priced. It produces the deferred maintenance backlog, and the backlog against the replacement value is the condition index. That is the number a board or a finance committee can act on, and it is why an audit is worth doing properly rather than as a walk round with a clipboard. Our free condition assessment worksheet takes the system totals and reads the index off them.
Questions people ask about facility inspection
Who should carry out a condition audit?
Somebody competent in each system being assessed, which for the fabric and the major plant usually means an engineer rather than the maintenance team alone. The pricing can be yours; the judgement about remaining life should not be invented.
How often is a full audit needed?
Long enough apart that the cost is justified and often enough that the index means something as a trend. Between audits, keep the backlog current from the deferrals your own inspections produce.
Is a statutory inspection the same thing?
No. Statutory inspections are obligations with their own regimes, dates and competent persons, and they belong on the obligations calendar. What a regime requires of your building belongs to your regulator and your insurer, not to any software.