Glossary
Maintenance Supervisor Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential maintenance supervisor terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key maintenance supervisor vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in maintenance supervisor training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Backlog
- Work waiting.
- CMMS
- Maintenance management software.
- Critical spares
- Must-have parts.
- Lockout/tagout
- Energy isolation procedure.
- MTBF
- Mean time between failures.
- MTTR
- Mean time to repair.
- Planner
- Prepares maintenance work.
- PM
- Preventive maintenance.
- Predictive maintenance
- Fixing based on condition data.
- Reliability
- Equipment dependability.
- Root cause analysis
- Finding why failures happen.
- Run to failure
- Fixing only when broken.
- Shutdown
- Planned stop for maintenance.
- Work order
- Repair request.
- Wrench time
- Time spent fixing.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free Maintenance Supervisor practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see Maintenance Supervisor training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.