Companies that handle automated processes with industrial machinery can be very exposed if an incident occurs: stopping production until the problem is solved could lead to substantial economic losses. An agile management in the reporting and performance of the SAT will be crucial to minimize the damage. Let’s see what is the corrective maintenance, what types exist, what advantages and disadvantages they present, and when their use prevails over preventive maintenance.
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What is corrective maintenance?
Corrective maintenance consists of the actions of the technical service in response to warnings about the malfunction of some equipment, asset or process. It comprises a group of tasks of a technical nature whose purpose is to correct faults that occur in the operation of the machinery.
These actions can be requested unexpectedly. They are not part of a scheduled maintenance plan, and it could even be a long time before anyone has to open a support ticket.
In fact, when these incidents occur, there is usually a critical situation in the company: being mostly isolated interventions, the SAT does not always have the supplies and resources to deal with the incident. It is easy to assume that, when there is a machine that is not working as it should, the situation easily becomes urgent.
The operation of the corrective maintenance consists, therefore, in that the company requests technical assistance to a SAT when an equipment presents anomalies in its operation, or simply a failure has become effective.
In response to this request, which may be received through a technical service software such as STEL Order, SAT will be able to deploy its action protocol, monitor the incident and coordinate the actions of all components of the staff support.
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Types of corrective maintenance
Planned corrective maintenance
It consists of the early detection of failures in the performance of an equipment: through proper monitoring, signs of possible errors can be detected, and the SAT can be preventively informed and prepared to address the incidence in the short to medium term.
Whatever the case may be, if the performance of a piece of equipment is compromised, even if it has not stopped working completely, the company risks a situation of drop in productivity, with the aggravating factor of time. A malfunctioning machine is like a ticking time bomb, and its total inoperability is only a matter of time.
Unplanned corrective maintenance
This type of corrective maintenance does not respond to planning, but consists of actions against unforeseen events, caused by premature failure of parts or lack of regular monitoring of the asset. An unexpected breakdown or sudden malfunction will inevitably require SAT attention, with irremediable downtime to follow.
It is in these periods when the economic consequences are most severe for companies, since production cannot continue until the breakdown is resolved. In addition, the repair rarely solves the problem in the long term, as it often takes on the appearance of an “emergency patch”, and the equipment is left running “just fine”.
Benefits and disadvantages of corrective maintenance
Benefit 1: short-term savings
Despite the urgency of these interventions, they are still only one-off actions: the company will not incur higher costs than those stipulated by the SAT for that specific operation. Moreover, if everything works well, it may never need to be resorted to.
Benefit 2: minimal planning
Since corrective maintenance consists of intervening in an isolated manner in the face of a performance failure, the company will not have to invest resources in planning the maintenance of these equipment or assets, and it will be enough to open a support ticket for the SAT to intervene.
Benefit 3: simplicity
On the operational side, corrective maintenance can be considered a simple intervention: it is just a matter of correcting the malfunction, either by fitting a spare part or by replacing the faulty equipment with a new one.
Benefit 4: overall optimization of production costs
As we will see later, a preventive maintenance is usually more expensive than simply contracting out corrective operations. When downtime and repair costs are lower than this schedule of actions, it will be more cost-effective for the company to contract corrective maintenance.
Disadvantage 1: exposure to unforeseen situations
Relying entirely on corrective maintenance actions will inevitably expose equipment to malfunctions. The absence of preventive actions can lead to unexpected failures of any kind, and some could be really expensive and/or serious for the productive process.
Disadvantage 2: lengthening of operational downtime
The success of a corrective intervention depends, to a large extent, on the availability of spare parts. If the malfunction is not one of the most common malfunctions, it will be very unlikely that the SAT will have replacement supplies available in a short period of time, which will lengthen the downtime of the equipment or asset.
Disadvantage 3: reduced equipment lifetime
The life cycle of equipment that is not periodically monitored will be shorter. It is highly likely that malfunctions will eventually trigger a cascade of events that will shorten the life of the equipment.
Disadvantage 4: “”cheap is expensive””
It’s true that nothing needs to happen, but what if it does? And what’s worse: what if it happens too often? It could be that, in an attempt to save on scheduled maintenance costs, breakdowns may occur whose cost is higher than the investment that could have been made by contracting preventive actions, or whose set-up time exceeds what can be assumed.
When to use corrective maintenance instead of preventive maintenance
Although the Spanish saying tells us that “”prevention is better than cure””, and the idea of preventive maintenance is postulated as the best solution, it may not always be taken into account as the only alternative.
Preventive maintenance can become very expensive, since it will require a scheduled supervision by the technical service; on the other hand, many cycles of operation of the machinery may pass without any breakdown, and this absence of interventions would imply a saving in the maintenance budget.
However, not having a preventive maintenance plan can be considered a reckless action, even more so if the equipment under maintenance fulfills a critical function in the production chain.
Common sense tells us that corrective maintenance may be sufficient to deal with possible incidents of equipment whose criticality is not significant within the production process. Assuming that it is more expensive to maintain it than to fix it when it breaks down, the impact on the production chain of the malfunction of certain equipment may not have a very harmful economic repercussion for the company.
However, the maintenance of machines whose performance is most crucial should not be left to emergency actions. Relying on corrective maintenance interventions on critical equipment denotes a serious lack of planning.
Corrective maintenance operations are usually critical, and the TSS is required to react quickly to the incident report. However, it is possible that the lack of availability of spare parts or the complexity of the failure may not allow a solution in reasonable costs and time, so it is recommended to combine corrective actions with a preventive maintenance plan.
