Everyone needs a corrective maintenance plan. We’ve always been on the side of preventive maintenance, and that isn’t likely to change soon. The benefits of a proactive maintenance strategy are countless: from being able to save on maintenance costs, reducing downtime, improving the lifespan of your assets, and being in control of your decision-making, it’s always better to fix the small problems before they become big ones.
With predictive maintenance, you can even forecast potential failures and isolate your maintenance tasks to the most essential. Condition-based maintenance, for example, uses condition monitoring to direct your preventive maintenance tasks exactly where they are needed.
It isn’t possible to prevent breakdowns. Some assets run out of steam for good. You can have the most effective asset management approach and prolong the reliability and lifecycle of your equipment for so long. In cases like this, you don’t want to be found unprepared. A corrective maintenance plan will help you deal with equipment failure.
What’s more, when done right, corrective maintenance can help restore service after an outage and prolong the life and reliability of your equipment. Corrective actions are often considered part of reactive maintenance, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be proactive with your approach. Corrective maintenance planning will ensure you’re prepared in the event of failures or shutdowns. You’ll have a proper maintenance program in place instead of reaching for short-term or emergency solutions to unscheduled downtime.
“Corrective Maintenance Task Generation is best performed by the same personnel who perform corrective maintenance. The normal technician’s time schedule does not allow the time to document tasks in detail. … One solution to the manpower issue is to maintain an extra technician for documenting corrective maintenance tasks. Technicians can be rotated on a periodic basis by area of expertise to document corrective maintenance tasks, perform parts research, and perform lock-out/tag-out verification for those tasks.”
Reliability Web
What Is Equipment Reliability?
Equipment reliability refers to the fitness of assets for their intended purpose. It measures how long an asset will run without failure and will be available for use. It is calculated based on the amount of time the equipment runs correctly and without failure. If, for example, a printer is available for 50 hours out of an expected 100 hours of production, the printer can be said to be 50% reliable.
What Is Corrective Maintenance?
Corrective maintenance refers to any maintenance work done to restore the functionality of an asset or piece of equipment. It is the process of getting assets back to work after breakdowns or unplanned downtime. It includes all maintenance actions geared toward restoring uptime, such as troubleshooting, diagnosis, disassembling, and repairing machines.
Replacing spare parts, refueling equipment, and even root cause analysis also fall under this category. These activities could also be part of planned maintenance. The difference is that in such cases, it is done before breakdowns happen. For example, lubrication could be part of scheduled maintenance activities to keep an asset running smoothly. If the asset breaks down, lubrication could become part of the corrective maintenance tasks to get it back up and running.
“CM tasks are prioritized so that the high-priority tasks that may be safety related or affecting production are addressed first.”
Science Direct
Use KPIs to Track Your Equipment Reliability
One way to track your assets’ performance is by using Key Performance Indicators. You can track many KPIs, but some key metrics to keep your eyes on are:
Equipment Downtime
This tells you how much time a particular asset spends out of service. If you record high downtime for any particular asset, you might need to conduct a root cause analysis to determine the deeper problem. For example, it might be that your maintenance initiatives aren’t as effective as they should be. It could also point to something fundamentally wrong with the asset. However, equipment downtime is sometimes the result of planned maintenance.
Mean Time Between Failure
This measures the average amount of time between failure modes of an asset. MTBF is measured by noting the total amount of production hours within a period of time and dividing that by the total number of failures within that time. For example, 10 failures within a year when an asset has 500 production hours total would mean an MTBF value of 50.
Mean Time to Repair
This measures the average amount of time it takes to get an asset back in service with corrective maintenance. MTTR provides insight into the maintainability of your assets.
Reliability-Centered Maintenance
One significant way of ensuring equipment reliability is by carrying out reliability-centered maintenance. As its name suggests, reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a maintenance program focused on optimizing a facility’s equipment reliability. It involves establishing safe minimum levels of equipment upkeep and matching individual assets with the maintenance techniques most likely to deliver cost-effective outcomes.
The principle of RCM is that the less maintenance you carry out, the better. The key objectives of RCM are:
- Maintain system reliability.
- Identify failure modes that can impede reliability.
- Prioritize failure modes according to their risk and potential costs.
- Select the most effective tasks to control failure modes.
RCM aims to increase profitability by reducing maintenance spending compared to other time-based preventive maintenance programs.
Sounds Great. Do I Need Anything Else?
Simply because plans don’t always work out. Preventive maintenance doesn’t prevent all failures, and in the event that a problem escapes your preventive efforts, you want to be ready to correct it. This is where planned corrective maintenance comes in.
Unplanned or unscheduled corrective maintenance occurs immediately after an equipment failure when an asset needs to be back in service immediately. As you can imagine, such circumstances don’t allow for much long-term thinking. Instead, the focus of breakdown maintenance is on solving the problem momentarily. Meanwhile, planned corrective maintenance can be more focused on long-term equipment reliability.
Planned corrective maintenance often takes the form of run-to-failure maintenance: This happens when a manufacturing or maintenance team allows an asset to run until it breaks down. After this happens, the organization repairs (or, in some cases, replaces) the asset. This approach is based on criticality: only redundant systems and non-critical assets benefit from this approach.
But we also think that computerized maintenance management software will help.
Use MaintainX to Improve Your Equipment Reliability
Take advantage of the technological solutions out there to improve your corrective maintenance and equipment reliability. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) can help you track your asset performance, measure and analyze your KPIs, and generate actionable insights.
MaintainX, which was recently rated the #1 CMMS in G2’s Winter 2023 Report, is a powerful tool for optimizing your maintenance operations. MaintainX can help you:
- Create and assign work orders
- Send and receive real-time updates via web and mobile apps
- Track your asset performance
- Create Standard Operating Procedures
FAQs
Lekan Olanrewaju
Lekan Olanrewaju is a content writer at MaintainX with years of experience in media and content creation. He has held positions at various media organizations, working with and leading teams at print magazines, digital publications, and television productions.
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