What is Corrective Maintenance?

Unexpected maintenance events can occur at any time and having a plan of action in place for such instances may not always be possible. However, it’s essential to take corrective action right away. Corrective maintenance is maintenance performed to return malfunctioning hardware or equipment to proper working order. With corrective maintenance, businesses can:

• Identify performance issues
• Isolate the source of the problem
• Repair problems in real-time

Using Corrective Maintenance for Unplanned Events

It’s almost impossible to know when parts or equipment will fail, so troubleshooting problems as they occur with corrective maintenance is important for every business.

Emergency repair solutions such as disassembling and reassembling, making adjustments, or performing maintenance often requires flexibility, especially when it comes to unplanned downtime.

Unscheduled maintenance can also be costly. It requires human labor, parts, and other miscellaneous resources, but with a corrective maintenance plan in place, businesses can keep both the disruption and the costs to a minimum.

Examples of Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is an essential practice used by most organizations daily. With corrective maintenance strategies in place, businesses can prepare for the worst, even if they don’t know which mishaps might happen next.

There are many different types of corrective maintenance. A few include:

• Dealing with service outages
• Fixing burst pipes
• Replacing old filters
• Repairing broken-down vehicles

These are just a few examples. Any type of unplanned maintenance that results in getting the broken-down equipment back to working order can be defined as corrective maintenance.

What Are the Advantages of Corrective Maintenance?

Corrective maintenance offers many advantages to businesses. Implementing corrective maintenance strategies allows decision-makers to control costs and save on human capital.

Organizations that want to get the most out of their resources should consider the ways that corrective maintenance can improve their operational efficiencies:

Less Upfront Planning

Eliminating the need for pre-planning allows businesses to reduce costs by removing the need for preventative maintenance strategies. Although fixing or purchasing new equipment has associated costs, reactive maintenance strategies don’t require ongoing investments until failures occur.

Simplified Deployments

Corrective maintenance is naturally simple and allows businesses to reduce the complexity of their asset management strategies. By reducing the amount of overhead required for management, corrective maintenance makes deploying equipment easier and less time-consuming.

Optimized Performance

Even with preventive maintenance, failures still occur. This reality can leave businesses investing in outdated equipment that’s no longer effective. Optimizing performance after failures allows businesses to mitigate unwanted costs associated with other maintenance strategies.

While corrective maintenance has many benefits, it can also lead to disruptions in operations and the inability to deliver timely service.

What Are the Disadvantages of Corrective Maintenance?

The benefits of corrective maintenance don’t always outweigh the costs. Applying only corrective maintenance, businesses can be left without the proper infrastructure for providing goods or services to end-users.

With less oversight, more expenses, and the potential for equipment failures, corrective maintenance might not always be the right solution for your business.

Less Control

Corrective maintenance might be needed at any time. This unpredictability makes it difficult for decision-makers to make the best decisions about how funds and other resources should be allocated. Failures could mean unexpectedly high costs, which could put operations in jeopardy.

Higher Costs

Performing ongoing maintenance and repairs saves money in the long term, and a lack of proper maintenance causes equipment to degrade faster and leads to inefficiencies. This degradation can hurt the business and its ability to deliver service to end-users.

Unexpected Downtime

For most businesses, equipment failures can mean the difference between success and failure. When equipment isn’t properly maintained, it can lead to interruptions in production. This downtime can create an unsafe environment and can damage the organization’s reputation over time.

Simplify Corrective Maintenance with Asset Tracking

For the best results when relying on corrective maintenance strategies, businesses should consider using equipment asset tags with a comprehensive maintenance management solution. Camcode’s Metalphoto® Anodized Aluminum equipment tags are designed to meet your application’s specifications, with the durability to withstand harsh environmental conditions — both indoors and out — and remain readable throughout the lifespan of your assets. With the right asset tracking solutions and maintenance plans in place, you’ll have all you need to manage your essential equipment when failures occur.

Corrective maintenance is a response to maintenance events such as decreased production or other performance issues as they occur with the goal of restoring the equipment to its optimal working order. It aims to address performance issues before equipment actually breaks down, reducing the risk of business disruption. Corrective maintenance enables businesses to identify issues, pinpoint the source of those issues, and take immediate action to repair or mitigate the problem.