Understanding Corrective Maintenance: Its Impact on Facility Efficiency

As a facility manager, you know how important a preventive maintenance strategy is for your company, but when you can quantify that impact across the business, it’s easier to see just how critical it really is.

So, what are the numbers?

According to Forbes, unplanned downtime costs manufacturing companies about $50 billion every year.  Another study from Deloitte indicates that unplanned maintenance and other downtime can reduce production capacity by up to 20%.

When it comes to asset and equipment maintenance, there are two main categories: corrective and preventative. Each category offers specific benefits and likely has a role to play in your maintenance planning. For example, a part that is still functioning but showing some evidence of unusual wear should be handled differently than a part that has completely failed and stopped an entire production line. 

Each maintenance category can further be broken down into various divisions, depending on your company’s goals, resources, and methods for maintenance. Every maintenance strategy plays an important role in your overall plan, and when used together, they help you keep your company’s production up and downtime to a minimum. By choosing the right type of maintenance for each situation, you can better shuffle projects throughout the facility and ensure your maintenance priorities are aligned with your department’s goals. With the right maintenance strategy, you can improve processes, increase production, and stay on budget. 

What is corrective maintenance?

Corrective maintenance, also known as reactive maintenance, is performed anytime a problem is identified. Many times, corrective maintenance is done after a failure has occurred, but not always. Corrective maintenance can also be completed after a problem has been noted, even if that problem has not yet created a failure. 

What are some examples of corrective maintenance?  

There are a lot of cases where you might choose corrective maintenance over other types of maintenance at your facility: 

• A part has failed completely, shutting down a critical machine. You use corrective maintenance when you troubleshoot the problem and repair the asset or equipment to get production started again. 
• During a routine maintenance inspection, significant wear is found on a part that could lead to total failure. You replace the part before it fails to avoid unnecessary damage and production delays. 
• A basic and inexpensive part is very time-consuming to replace. You know the part could fail at any time, but you wait to replace it until it fails completely because it is more effective to use the part as long as it is functions

These are examples of corrective maintenance, since the work was completed in reaction to an identified problem. 

What is the difference between preventive and corrective maintenance? 

You can use both corrective and preventive maintenance in different ways your facility running efficiently. The main difference is that preventative maintenance is the planned, routine maintenance of equipment, assets, and facilities that your facilities team does to keep everything working as it should and prevent equipment failure. Corrective maintenance, on the other hand, is the work you complete after you identify a problem. With a good preventative maintenance plan, you can reduce the amount of corrective maintenance required in your facility and extend the expected life of your assets and equipment. 

Examples of preventative maintenance include: 

• Regular inspections 
• Changing filters 
• Checking vents 
• Regular cleaning 
• Checking lubrication

Managing preventative and corrective maintenance in a facility with significant assets and equipment can be difficult and time-consuming without the right assistance. To help with the process, many companies use maintenance-tracking software.  

With the right computerized maintenance management software (CMMS), you can save time and money, reduce downtime on your assets and equipment, and improve your resource planning by tracking all your data in one place. You can quickly and easily review and prioritize maintenance requests, retrieve stored information on warranties and asset tags, check inventory, and even manage vendors. When you use a great CMMS, you can reduce the time you spend managing paperwork and get back to maintaining your facility.

What are the types of corrective maintenance? 

Corrective maintenance falls into two categories: planned and unplanned. 

Unplanned corrective maintenance occurs when a machine or part breaks down unexpectedly and needs to be fixed. Unplanned corrective maintenance can also happen when a total breakdown hasn’t occurred, but you have identified a problem that is serious enough to warrant an unplanned repair. 

Planned corrective maintenance can occur in a couple of different ways. For example, if you identify a part that needs to be repaired but is not an urgent or potentially dangerous problem, you may decide to wait until a more convenient or less disruptive time to make the repair.  

Using a run-to-failure strategy on specific assets or equipment is another way facilities managers use planned corrective maintenance. In this case, you won’t know when the asset will fail, but you made a strategic decision to allow it to fail rather than perform preventative maintenance. 

Preventative maintenance can highlight both planned and unplanned corrective maintenance issues and is an essential component of good corrective maintenance. A maintenance management software solution can help you manage and track both corrective and preventive maintenance tasks across your entire facility. With the right CMMS, you have the information you need to make the best choices for maintenance on everything from simple light fixtures to multi-million-dollar production lines.  

Why is corrective maintenance important? 

Both preventive and corrective maintenance are essential components to keeping your facility running smoothly. Preventive maintenance can often help you identify potential problems before they become big disasters, while corrective maintenance fixes both small problems as well as big disasters. 

When it comes to managing facilities, all maintenance tasks are critical to the overall success of your facility. Downtime and safety issues can create ripple effects across an organization, and a good maintenance program is the first line of defense against major shutdowns. For example, when a critical piece of the production line goes down, it affects all parts of production up and down the line and often results in increased labor costs, delayed shipments, cancelled orders, and increased product costs.  

Managing a maintenance program for any size facility can be a complicated and difficult job. As a maintenance manager, you bear a huge responsibility to keep all the assets and equipment at your organization running smoothly. Using the right CMMS can help you organize your facility’s information in one location and give you access to all the data you need, no matter where you are. By adding a CMMS tool to your arsenal, you can simplify and automate much of your data tracking and record-keeping and give yourself more time to get back to the business of maintaining your facility. 

Executive summary 

Managing maintenance for the assets and equipment in a facility of any size can be a time-consuming and difficult task without the right tools. Given the impact that proper maintenance has on production, safety, and the bottom line, it’s important to have a comprehensive solution for managing the maintenance data in your facility.  

When choosing the best way to manage and track maintenance operations at your company, consider the following:  

• Efficiency: How much time is spent searching for records or repeating processes because the documentation is missing? Having all your maintenance records in a central location and accessible from anywhere means no time is lost searching for vital information like warranties or maintenance records. 
• Cost: Are problems like unnecessary downtime or repeated failures costing you money? How much is your company spending to fix problems that could have been prevented with proper maintenance and better tracking? 
• Tracking: Having access to all your maintenance data in one place can help you highlight potential problems, redirect resources to needed areas, and update maintenance schedules to reduce downtime and increase asset and equipment life expectancy. 
• Inventory: How often is inventory miscounted or misplaced? Are you missing vital parts, or spending extra to have parts shipped in, only to find out later the part was in a storeroom? A great inventory control software can help you reduce or eliminate inventory problems and save both time and money. 

Next steps

Want help tracking your facility’s maintenance records and tasks?  

Hippo is here to help you make it happen. We can answer your questions about maintenance strategies (and everything else related to maintenance and compliance), help you book a live software demo, or even set you up with a free trial.