Corrective Maintenance (CM)

What is Corrective Maintenance?

Corrective Maintenance is a type of maintenance that is performed to correct problems and restore equipment and machines to a working condition. Unlike Predictive Maintenance, which helps predict future failures, Corrective Maintenance tasks can both be either planned or unplanned. 

These are the three typical situations that occur when corrective maintenance is implemented in place: 

1. When a piece of equipment or machine suddenly fails
2. When a defect is detected through condition monitoring
3. When an inspection unveils an issue

Benefits of Corrective Maintenance: 

Corrective maintenance software enables maintenance to be performed just as needed. The main advantage of Corrective Maintenance is decreased emergency maintenance orders,  as well as increased employee safety.

When used as part of a larger maintenance strategy, corrective maintenance can provide multiple benefits. Some of these benefits of Corrective Maintenance include:

• Lowered duration of both planned and unplanned downtime 
• Reduced cost of maintaining a reactive maintenance strategy
• Decrease in overall costs related to maintenance
• Improved productivity with staff as the maintenance team can focus on other tasks

The main goal of every maintenance team is to quickly and effectively attend to issues on the factory floor, especially unplanned defects and/or breakdowns. Corrective Maintenance software enables maintenance teams to complete their job with optimal results. 

Preventive vs Corrective Maintenance:

Preventive Maintenance workflow means completing a maintenance task before a failure has actually occurred. This process is mainly performed to prevent malfunctions in production. On the other hand, Corrective Maintenance workflow means completing a maintenance task that has just occurred.

The Types of Corrective Maintenance:

Corrective Maintenance can be broken down into two types of maintenance:

• Planned corrective maintenance – this type of maintenance comes into play when a run-to-failure maintenance strategy is implemented. This means running the equipment or machine until it breaks down, and only then is replaced. 
• Unplanned corrective maintenance –  this type of maintenance, however, is used  when a preventive maintenance is scheduled but suddenly a failure interrupts the process. Maintenance will then be performed either on the spot or scheduled at a later date. 

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When to use Corrective Maintenance?

Corrective Maintenance, in addition to identifying potential defects, optimizes the condition of equipment and machines. This type of maintenance should be used when condition-based monitoring detects an issue, when non-essential machines can be allowed to run to failure, and when a system has repetition that enables it to function properly even if it fails.