The Difference Between Servicing vs Thorough Examination

What each visit actually does: the same machine, two different questions

Put both visits on the same fork lift and watch what each actually touches. The service visit follows the manufacturer's schedule: oils and filters changed, brakes adjusted, mast channels greased, hydraulic hoses eyeballed, worn consumables swapped, faults the operator logged investigated and cleared. Its output is a machine running better than it arrived, and a service record listing work done and parts fitted. Its logic is preventive: replace and adjust before wear becomes failure.

The thorough examination follows the competent person's methodology for the equipment class: chains measured for elongation against discard criteria, forks measured at the heel, hooks examined for cracks and distortion, structural welds inspected, safety devices proven to operate, the whole assessed against the question Regulation 9 asks, is this equipment safe to continue in use until the next examination. Its output is an opinion with evidence: the Report of Thorough Examination, defects on the statutory tiers, dates both ways, and a signature whose qualifications are on the document.

Notice the tells that distinguish them even when one engineer does both jobs on one visit. Measurement against discard criteria is examination thinking; adjustment to specification is service thinking. An opinion on continued safety is examination; a list of work done is service. A document with Schedule 1 contents is a report; a document with parts and labour is an invoice. Where a visit is sold as both, insist the outputs stay distinct, one report, one service record, because a hybrid document reliably satisfies neither purpose, and our guide to the report defines what the examination half must contain.

The third layer: where the pre use check sits between them

The two visit model is incomplete without its daily third layer, and estates that grasp all three stop misfiling responsibilities entirely. Between the fitter's periodic care and the examiner's statutory judgement sits the pre use check: the operator's brief, trained inspection before the equipment works, hooks and safety catches glanced, chains eyeballed for damage, controls and brakes proven, leaks and tyres and decals scanned.

Each layer covers the other two's blind time. The thorough examination is deep but arrives at intervals of months; deterioration between visits belongs to somebody, and that somebody is the operator and the maintenance schedule. The pre use check is shallow but daily, and it exists precisely to catch the obvious failure the day it appears rather than the month the examiner does: the bent fork from yesterday's misjudged pallet, the safety catch that vanished over the weekend, the hydraulic weep that started on nights. Maintenance sits between, converting the operator's reports and the examiner's observations into scheduled work.

Run the three layers as one reporting system rather than three silos. The operator's defect book feeds the maintenance planner the same shift; the service visit clears the book and notes what it found; the examiner receives both histories before each examination and returns observations that reshape the service scope. An estate where the three layers talk catches almost everything twice, and an estate where they do not documents each failure three times, once in the unread defect book, once in the service file, and finally in the examination report that stops the machine.

Why the examiner should not mark their own homework

The visits differ in one more structural way: who may do them. Your service engineer can be anyone competent you choose, including your own fitters. The thorough examination demands a competent person with the knowledge and experience to detect and assess defects, who the ACOP guidance expects to be sufficiently independent and impartial to make objective decisions, and the standing HSE position is specific on the crux: the examiner should not be the same person who performs the routine maintenance, because they would be assessing their own work.

The logic is not an insult to fitters; it is about the geometry of judgement. The person who adjusted the brake last month approaches it expecting their own work to be sound, and every marginal call, is this wear acceptable, is that crack indication real, is quietly weighted by whose work a failure would embarrass and whose schedule a stoppage would wreck. Examination exists to be the outside view, and the outside view cannot be manufactured from inside the maintenance chain.

In practice this yields a simple architecture. Maintenance in house or contracted to whoever serves the plant best. Examination by a competent person outside that maintenance chain, external in most estates, or in large organisations a genuinely separated internal function with authority to fail equipment regardless of production. And where one provider offers both service and examination, the question to ask is exactly the homework question: are the examining engineers separated from the servicing engineers on our plant, and would the examiner fail a repair their own colleague fitted. Providers with a real answer describe the separation in one breath.

The same geometry, incidentally, is why examination findings should never be negotiated through the service relationship: the moment the examiner's opinion becomes a commercial conversation, the outside view is gone.

The same distinction in every regime on your estate

The servicing versus examination boundary is not a LOLER quirk; it runs identically through every statutory regime you hold, and mapping it once per regime ends a whole family of confusions. On pressure systems, maintenance keeps the compressor, boiler and their protective devices serviceable, and PSSR's examination under the Written Scheme is the competent person's separate statutory judgement; the scheme even assumes normal maintenance continues, which makes the point exactly, the examination judges a maintained system, it does not maintain it. Servicing the safety valve is care; the examination that tests it against the scheme is judgement.

On extraction, the fortnightly filter changes, belt checks and weekly user checks are maintenance under COSHH's efficient state duty, and the 14 month TExT is the statutory examination that judges whether the maintained system still achieves adequate control. A serviced LEV system with no TExT is precisely the crane from the worked example, wearing a fan. And on general work equipment, PUWER holds both duties itself in adjacent regulations: Regulation 5's maintenance duty and Regulation 6's inspection where deterioration can lead to danger, with the inspection recorded and the maintenance arranged however you judge best.

The estate level tool is the same two column audit extended to four regimes: every asset, its care arrangement and its judgement arrangement, named per regime. One pass through that grid surfaces every machine whose service contract has been quietly impersonating its examination, every LEV system on a maintenance plan and no TExT clock, and every pressure system whose scheme assumes maintenance that nobody is actually doing.

Two calendars, one estate: running service and examination together

Once the distinction is clear, the residual work is calendar engineering, because every asset now carries two cycles that must both be honoured and neither may absorb the other. Examination intervals are the fixed points: 6 months for accessories and people lifting equipment, 12 months for other lifting equipment unless an examination scheme sets different intervals, the pressure and LEV regimes on their own statutory clocks. Service intervals are the movable ones: manufacturer guidance flexed by duty, environment and your own reliability data.

Build the calendar from the fixed points outward. Anchor every asset's examination dates first, then place service visits where they serve the examination rather than shadow it: a service shortly before an examination presents the equipment at its best and is a legitimate tactic, while a service shortly after can action the report's findings while the fitter is mobilised. What the calendar must never do is let one visit masquerade as the other, and the classic drift, so gradual nobody decides it, is the annual service quietly becoming the only visit an asset receives.

Make the two cycles feed each other deliberately, because run well they are a reinforcing loop. Examination findings are free intelligence for the maintenance plan: an observation trending on mast wear moves the relevant strip forward; a B category on hoses adds a line to the service scope. Service records are context for the examiner: hours run, faults cleared, parts replaced since the last visit sharpen the examination judgement, so send them ahead of each examination as routine. Estates that run the loop find both visits getting cheaper, because each arrives already knowing what the other learned.

The audit that keeps it honest is the two column check from the worked example, run twice a year: every asset, last serviced, last examined, no empty cells and no cell doing both jobs.