Maintenance is an important part of any business and helps make sure to keep your assets in proper shape and functional. There are different types of maintenance strategies like preventive, predictive and corrective maintenance. Of these, preventive and predictive maintenance are widely adopted.
But for a good maintenance plan, you need a combination of these two along with corrective maintenance. Corrective maintenance is very useful and helps save money if used right. In this article, we discuss the important things you need to know about corrective maintenance and when to use it.
What is corrective maintenance?
Corrective maintenance, as is obvious from its name, is used to correct or repair something after a problem or failure has occurred to one of the business tools or equipment. The failures can be unexpected or unscheduled and hence, corrective maintenance is an emergency maintenance procedure. Basically, you implement corrective maintenance to fix business assets that stopped working suddenly or is not performing as per the expectations.
The main objective of this maintenance strategy is to return a business asset to a condition in which it can perform the job it is intended to do. There are two types of corrective maintenance plans – unplanned corrective maintenance and planned corrective maintenance.
Difference between corrective and preventive maintenance
Corrective maintenance is implemented after the unexpected or unscheduled failure of business assets so as to return it to a condition where it can perform its intended job as expected. Preventive maintenance is used to prevent any unexpected failures or breakdown by employing preventive techniques. Preventive maintenance is usually done to replace parts of the assets before it completely stops working.
Preventive maintenance helps to protect business assets and helps to prevent the cost of repair or replacement of a business asset. Corrective maintenance is implemented when the cost of repair or replacement is inferior to the cost of preventive techniques. Corrective maintenance is also perfect for those pieces of equipment that are not crucial to the smooth running of business operations as their downtime won’t affect the productivity deeply.
Advantages of corrective maintenance
- Lower cost of maintenance – Corrective maintenance is a reactive maintenance task. The cost incurred after the purchase of equipment and before its breakdown is very low. Hence, there is no need for investing in CMMS software
- Requires minimal planning – Since repair is carried out after the breakdown of an asset, corrective maintenance strategy requires very little planning.
- Simple – Corrective maintenance is pretty straightforward and is hence easy to understand and execute.
- The best plan in some situations – As mentioned above, this strategy is best used when the asset in question is not crucial to the smooth running of the business operations so that its downtime won’t affect the business a lot. It is also perfect for those assets whose cost of repair is lower than the cost for preventive maintenance.
Disadvantages of corrective maintenance
- Unpredictable – In the case of corrective maintenance, the business assets won’t be maintained or monitored properly. Thus failures will be very unpredictable.
- Lowers productivity – Unexpected breakdowns will definitely affect the efficiency of the business operations because of the delay caused by the repair of equipment.
- Reduces asset life – As the assets are not maintained properly or monitored at all after purchase, the life of the asset will be shorter than is expected.
- Hige long term cost – Sometimes assets that are expensive and crucial to the business may fail. Replacing or repairing such resources can be very costly. Also, when crucial assets fail, their downtime will seriously affect the business operations and hence the productivity thus incurring huge long term costs.
Conclusion
The article covers all the basic information regarding corrective maintenance. Thorough research and a combination of different maintenance techniques will provide the best results.
