Imagine you’re in your business watching the machines work. Everything is fine until one of them shuts down – the machine needs repairs.
You call your technicians, but they’re busy until tomorrow. A machine down means production slows down. This costs you money that your business needs for payroll.
It’s time that you thought about your maintenance strategies. But what are corrective maintenance strategies? How do you balance corrective and preventive maintenance? And what’s the difference?
This post will highlight different examples of corrective maintenance and the role it plays in your overall maintenance strategy.
What is Corrective Maintenance?
Corrective Maintenance refers to a specific way of protecting and maintaining assets. Specifically, it solves problems as they arise.
There are generally two ways that businesses do this:
- Planned corrective maintenance.
- Unplanned corrective maintenance.
The main difference between the two is urgency. You usually schedule a technician for repairs once you know they’re needed in planned maintenance. For more urgent matters, unplanned maintenance gets repairs done immediately.
There are a lot of good reasons to use this method:
- It reduces waste.
- It can save costs.
- It can save time.
These are great benefits to businesses. However, it’s not always the best way to handle maintenance. If you rely solely on corrective maintenance, then this sometimes leads to problems such as:
- The issues being much worse than you thought.
- Machinery needing to go down for long lengths of time.
- Production needing to slow down or shut.
- Employees working on repairs rather than their normal duties.
It comes down to the question of efficiency. Diversifying your maintenance strategy is always the best overall solution. It allows you to be prepared for any problems your business might face.
Examples of Corrective Maintenance
Businesses and professionals use corrective maintenance all the time. It doesn’t matter what type of business it is.
Businesses that do crafting classes have to clean up after lessons. If they did not, the area would become hazardous.
Restaurants clean pots and pans after they use them. They clean up spills on the floor so people don’t slip.
Administrative offices use a lot of consumable goods. A printer, for example, eventually runs out of ink. When this happens, they simply replace it with a new cartridge.
If your car gets a flat tire, then you replace that too. However, you wouldn’t replace perfectly good tires.
Factories typically have a lot of moving parts. If a conveyer belt gets torn, then they either fix or replace it.
In fact, any time a part of a machine breaks, then most likely corrective maintenance strategies solve the problem.
The Difference Between Corrective and Preventive Maintenance
Think about your car for a moment. You’re supposed to get your car’s oil changed every few thousand miles. This is to ensure that your car’s engine doesn’t suffer wear and tear too quickly.
You know when your car needs its oil changed. You make an appointment in advance for this service. You do this whether or not your car is actively having problems.
This is preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance strategies schedule repairs in advance of a problem. This helps ensure problems don’t develop in the first place.
Now think about what happens when you get sick. You see your doctor and you’re prescribed medicine. You take the medicine and you feel better.
However, you wouldn’t take this medicine before you got sick. That could actually do you more harm than good.
This makes this a good analogy for corrective maintenance. Corrective maintenance strategies solve problems as they arise. This works in three steps:
- First, you identify the problem. In the above example, the problem is that you’re sick.
- Second, a professional provides you with a diagnosis. A doctor identifies what illness you have.
- Third, you solve the problem using that knowledge. In this case, the doctor gave you medicine to treat your illness.
There are many times when a business will use corrective maintenance. In some cases, there isn’t much of a choice.
How Does a CMMS Help With Corrective Maintenance?
CMMS stands for Computerized Maintenance Management System. It is designed to help you organize, track, and analyze your assets and maintenance activities from a computer.
It does this by:
- Eliminating manual data entry and enabling field mobility.
- Recording historical data and statistics on equipment.
- Tracking equipment health, labor, inventory, costs, and work orders.
This software identifies problem areas quickly. It also lets you schedule technicians for repairs as soon as possible. That lets you resolve any issues quickly. This keeps downtime low and production flowing.
It lets you track the maintenance histories of your assets to improve decision-making. This gives you a better idea of when a machine is costing you more than it’s worth. This lets you decide when it’s time to replace assets altogether with something more reliable.
Tracking inventory is easy with CMMS. No one likes running out of supplies. This lets you order parts as you spare them, so you never run out.
All of these functions help you save time and money. It helps reduce waste and increase productivity. All of this is good news for your business.
Improve Your Corrective Maintenance Strategies Today
Corrective maintenance actions simply aren’t always your best option, but they’re and will always be a part of your overall maintenance strategy. CMMS lets your company deal with all corrective issues and schedule preventive maintenance in a smart and efficient way, so you get the best combination of corrective and preventive maintenance possible.
You want your maintenance activities running smoothly at all times. You want to avoid costly equipment downtime and production cuts. If you’re serious about making your asset and maintenance management more efficient, then you should look at CMMS solutions.
Let The Asset Guardian help you with this. Our CMMS technology is the most reliable on the market. Book a demo of TAG CMMS software today and see how it can help your business.