Maintenance is essential there is no doubt in it especially to those businesses which highly depend on machines and pieces of equipment. Maintenance increases performance decreases chances of failure and increases productivity and asset life as well. But the question of which type of maintenance suits your business. In this blog we are covering corrective maintenance such as what is corrective maintenance, what are its advantages, and best practices. So, without any further ado let us begin!
What is corrective maintenance?
Corrective maintenance is the process of bringing assets back to running condition. This maintenance can be planned activity or unplanned activity.
It can be based on condition monitoring of equipment or during an inspection an issue is found when sudden asset breakdown occurs, or it can be totally unplanned (run to failure asset).
What are the categories of corrective maintenance?
Mainly corrective maintenance can be categorized into two categories
Corrective maintenance (scheduled) – Scheduled corrective maintenance is when you know that an asset is about to break down and you are prepared for it. Or you try to delay maintenance work due to a lack of resources such as unavailable of staff, time, or inventory.
According to the ResearchGate “The costs of maintenance are estimated to be between 15% and 40% of production costs (Dunn, 1987; Lofsten, 2000), and the trend toward automation has forced managers to pay more attention to maintenance.” That is why maintenance is important and 15 to 40 percent is huge especially in medium & big size organizations.
Corrective maintenance (unscheduled) – In unplanned corrective maintenance, the asset provided maintenance as quickly as possible. Most importantly if the equipment is critical. However, if an asset is non-critical then run to failure asset is also used in which maintenance is given as per the schedule because assets are non-critical and work can be completed without them also. Furthermore, it also needs to ensure that assets are inexpensive as well.
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What are the Pros of corrective maintenance?
There are several advantages of corrective maintenance that we have discussed below:
Cost-efficient for non-critical assets – Since corrective maintenance is majorly focused on assets as reactive maintenance. You can save a lot of money on non-critical assets. As it is done only when assets need maintenance not unnecessarily.
Simple process – Depending on the nature of the corrective maintenance type that your organization chooses. The process is simple for instance the maintenance team can focus on other tasks until an asset failure does not occur.
Less planning required – It does not need planning as much as you will need in preventive maintenance or conditioning-based monitoring maintenance. Why is that? Because mostly it is part of reactive maintenance and reactive maintenance needs no planning compare to proactive maintenance.
Planning optimization – Because this maintenance is centralized it allows management to prioritize assets accurately. It also allows management to optimize resources for monetary and labor expenses.
What are the Cons of corrective maintenance?
The disadvantages of corrective maintenance are as follow:
Uncertainty – Not giving proper maintenance to assets leads to uncertainty and more important assets become unreliable and unpredictable. When these assets are used for more than usual working hours then performance starts fluctuating.
Decrease asset life – When assets are not properly maintained & care is not taken then the performance of the asset decreases. As a result, decreased asset life. When asset does no perform better or need maintenance more than regular then management thinks of selling it.
Downtime & production delay – If corrective maintenance (reactive type) is used on critical assets then production delay might occur. When production delay occurs obviously some type of breakdown must have occurred then downtime will increase and production work will suffer. As a result, business loss can also take place.
What are the best practices to follow corrective maintenance?
Here are the best practices to follow corrective maintenance:
Invest in automated software – For any organization which has a plethora of assets will need automated software because without them there will be always some mistake in the process of maintenance. When you invest in automated software there are several other benefits you will notice once it is implemented.
Reactive corrective maintenance on non-critical assets – It is shall be only implemented on non-critical assets. If it is used on critical assets then business production will suffer. More importantly, if non-critical asset failure occurs it should not impact the safety of employees.
Software help in making informative decisions – The most important part of this software it provides valuable data. Data is the answer to all the problems it can help in letting know when an asset needs maintenance when it will need next maintenance and where you are spending most and where you need to invest. Data is helpful in making a crucial business decision and setting future goals. With the data assistance, you can make a decision based on statistics and not just based on assumptions.
Conclusion
The end goal of an organization is to grow business and, in that purpose, maintenance plays a crucial role. It can either make the whole game or break it! So, it depends on you what type of maintenance you use in your business.
However, there is another icebreaker! An automated software of maintenance management can be very effective in terms of asset maintenance. It will help in making the procedure automated and eliminate the chances of human error. It can assist in setting the priority of each asset plus this software will make your maintenance team more organized and more productive.
This maintenance can be very effective in organizations if one knows how to use it or on which type of assets it can be more productive. With CMMS software you can use corrective maintenance and other types of maintenance in an organized way. This software helps in scheduling maintenance.
Since this software is built for maintenance management, there is no question that this software can assist organizations in taking their maintenance management to next level.