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Equipment failure is the uninvited guest of asset management. The problem with preventative measures is that machines always malfunction, whether it be the breaking of a vital production line or a malfunction of your air conditioning on the hottest day of summer. Such unanticipated outages lead to chaos, budget leaks, and maintenance departments in a vicious circle of fire extinguishing.
But there is a change of attitude in modern maintenance. The breakdowns do not have to be considered as a tragedy, but rather as a separate entity in a bigger plan. That is what Corrective Maintenance is all about. It is not merely attaching things but a rational reaction. Being handled appropriately, corrective actions change scrambling chaos into nimble solutions that reestablish order in a relatively short period of time.
The right tools are needed to make this transition from chaos to control. This is where Cryotos excels. Through our smart Computerized Maintenance Management system (CMMS), this is possible by automating work orders, monitoring failure data, and performing repairs with accuracy. When using Cryotos, you no longer react to downtime, but rather make it intelligent so that your operations are robust.
Corrective maintenance is any maintenance activity conducted to diagnose, isolate, and fix any fault to help restore the failed equipment, machine, or system to the operational level.
Compared to preventive maintenance, which is planned and scheduled in advance to prevent failure before it takes place, corrective maintenance is reactive. It is what is done once a failure or malfunction is detected. The major objective is to troubleshoot the problem, make the required repairs/replacements, and restore the asset to its best operation within the shortest time.
It should be mentioned that corrective maintenance is not only applied to complete failures. It also includes responses done in cases when an asset is operating but is not at its best, or a machine is slower than usual or can produce strange sounds: the technicians can understand that something is wrong.
The urgency of equipment failures is not always similar. In order to effectively manage resources, corrective maintenance is often divided into three different types depending on the importance and the impact:
This is the most paramount corrective maintenance. It is also carried out immediately when there is a breakdown that is a major threat to safety, health, or production.
Urgent maintenance is concerned with the failures that need to be fixed immediately, but without a direct risk to the safety or a complete shutdown of production.
Also known as "deferred" or "scheduled" corrective maintenance, this deals with non-critical issues that can be addressed during scheduled maintenance windows or when resources are available.
Although running to failure and corrective maintenance (running to failure) are not effective approaches that should be used to maintain critical assets, a combination of both approaches can provide some unique benefits:
In case of a failure, a clear corrective maintenance procedure would mean that the technicians are able to troubleshoot the problem and fix it in a very short time. Organizations will greatly minimize the Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) since protocols can be used in troubleshooting and repair, thereby restoring operations on schedule.
Corrective maintenance can be more cost-effective than preventive maintenance in assets whose replacement cost is low, or in assets that do not affect core production (e.g., replacing a lightbulb or repairing a breakroom appliance). The labor hours spent on checking the assets that can be replaced by cheaper or easier to maintain ones do not have to be spent.
Corrective maintenance allows maintenance teams to be flexible. Since routine corrective tasks can be backlogged and performed when technicians have free time, it allows for better labor utilization. Resources can be concentrated on high-priority preventive tasks, with corrective tasks filling the gaps.
Although it may appear paradoxical, corrective maintenance undertaken in a timely manner does prolong the life of an asset. This can be done by working on small defects (such as a vibrating motor or a loose belt) as soon as they are detected, instead of leaving the problem to a scheduled service, which will cause secondary damage that will destroy the whole machine.
The most performing organizations do not have to make a decision between the use of Corrective and Preventive Maintenance; instead, they strike a balance between the two.
Facility management is an inevitable reality that comes with corrective maintenance. It can be a critical emergency or a regular fix, but it is this capability of responding quickly that turns agile organizations into those that are brought to a crawl by downtime.
However, speed should not be at the expense of organization. Never let the failures come in the way of your time, or use any sticky note to be fixed. With the help of an efficient CMMS, such as Cryotos, you will transform the reactive repairs to data-driven solutions, where your team will always be ready and be equipped and informed to take action.
Ready to take control of your maintenance chaos? Stop letting breakdowns manage you. Book a personalized demo with Cryotos today to discover how our platform can streamline your corrective maintenance strategy and keep your operations running smoothly.
