Editing Configuration management (section)

===Preventive maintenance===
{{Main|Preventive maintenance}}
Understanding the "as is" state of an asset and its major components is an essential element in preventive maintenance as used in maintenance, repair, and overhaul and [[enterprise asset management]] systems.

Complex assets such as aircraft, ships, industrial machinery etc. depend on many different components being serviceable. This serviceability is often defined in terms of the amount of usage the component has had since it was new, since fitted, since repaired, the amount of use it has had over its life and several other limiting factors. Understanding how near the end of their life each of these components is has been a major undertaking involving labor-intensive record keeping until recent developments in software.