The right maintenance strategy can help your business, no matter what your domain or product is. Sure, a good CMMS software is important but you need a plan for your maintenance as this can help you in more than one way and save you a lot of money and other resources. While many companies are investing more on plans to prevent and predict problems in their equipment, many of them forget the importance of corrective maintenance.
Good maintenance not only involves prediction and prevention but also cure the problems that occur on their machines. This means that corrective maintenance has to be combined with other forms of maintenance to garner the best possible effects. Read on to know everything that you need to know about corrective maintenance.
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What is Corrective Maintenance?
Corrective maintenance is the strategy which is employed after the failure or malfunction of business equipment or system occurs. Thus, it aims at correcting problems that have already occurred and is essential for any businesses. To formally define corrective maintenance, it is a maintenance task which is performed to identify, isolate and rectify a fault so that the failed equipment, machine or system can be restored to an operational condition within tolerances or limited established for in-service operations. There are two types of corrective maintenance – planned and unplanned corrective maintenance.
Basically, corrective maintenance follows some common methods or steps which can be applied generally in all the cases. They are finding out and following the failure that occurred, diagnosis of the problem, elimination of the part which caused the problem – this is done by ordering replacement and replacing the part with the new part – test of function and finally, the continuation of the use of equipment after restoring it to its original form.
Corrective maintenance is a step by step procedure and the steps are decided by the object’s failure. Modern technologies help to reduce the inherent drawbacks of corrective maintenance by providing useful information like history of the device, fault patterns, advice for repair and availability of spare parts. Corrective maintenance can also be divided into immediate corrective maintenance and deferred corrective maintenance.
Immediate corrective maintenance aims at starting the work or repair immediately after the failure occurs whereas, in deferred corrective maintenance, there is a delay as work is confirmed to a given set of maintenance rules. Whether or not a business needs corrective maintenance and how to incorporate it into the business maintenance strategy is a decision depending on a variety of factors like the cost of replacement and downtime, reliability characteristics and redundancy of assets.
When do we need corrective maintenance?
Corrective maintenance is best applied to equipment that is not crucial to the business operations and also on those resources for which, the cost of preventive maintenance is higher. The machine must be worn out completely before the equipment fails. There are two things that you have to consider before opting this strategy.
- Cost of maintenance – if the cost of replacing the failed equipment or repairing it is very low, then this approach is your best choice.
- The consequence of equipment downtime – If the equipment is not critical for the business operations to run smoothly and you can afford to have it down for some time, then corrective maintenance might be a good way to go.
Types of corrective maintenance
As mentioned above, there are two types of corrective maintenance strategies – planned and unplanned. Weirdly enough, corrective maintenance can be planned in advance.
Planned Corrective Maintenance – In planned corrective maintenance, the fault is detected in advance before the equipment stops working entirely and repair is done accordingly. This will help avoid the impact of downtime of the machine on business operations.
Unplanned corrective maintenance – In this maintenance strategy, repair of equipment is carried out only when it shuts down completely and stops working. Here, immediate correction s necessary to get the machine working as soon as possible.
To understand the concepts better, consider this example of a refrigerator. If you see that it takes longer to cool the items in it, you know something is wrong with its evaporator and that it needs replacement. You can search for prices and do research for the best evaporator before you finally invest in fixing the refrigerator’s fault. This is planned corrective maintenance.
Unplanned corrective maintenance is pretty straightforward in that, if your refrigerator stops working altogether, then you obviously need to repair whatever is wrong with it before it starts working again or might need to even replace it. Thus, unplanned corrective maintenance disrupts the flow of operations and is done after some problem occurs.
Conclusion
Thus, corrective maintenance is an integral part of any maintenance strategy and when incorporated into your maintenance plans, can help you save a lot.
Neha Nidhi
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