Glossary
Industrial Maintenance Technician Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential industrial maintenance technician terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key industrial maintenance technician vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in industrial maintenance technician training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Bearing
- A component that supports rotating shafts and reduces friction.
- CMMS
- Computerized maintenance management system for work orders and history.
- Hydraulics
- Power transmitted through pressurized fluid.
- Ladder logic
- A graphical PLC programming language that resembles electrical relay diagrams.
- Lockout/tagout
- Procedures to control hazardous energy during maintenance.
- MTBF
- Mean time between failures: a reliability measure.
- OEE
- Overall equipment effectiveness: availability × performance × quality.
- PLC
- Programmable logic controller: an industrial computer that controls machines.
- Pneumatics
- Power transmitted through compressed air.
- Predictive maintenance
- Using data such as vibration and temperature to predict failures.
- Preventive maintenance (PM)
- Scheduled maintenance to prevent failures.
- Proximity sensor
- A sensor that detects objects without contact.
- Root cause analysis (RCA)
- Finding the underlying reason a failure occurred.
- Shaft alignment
- Aligning connected shafts to reduce vibration and wear.
- VFD
- Variable frequency drive: controls motor speed.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Industrial Maintenance Technician practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Industrial Maintenance Technician training.
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