What is Difference Between Corrective and Preventive Maintenance?

 

If you run a business, maintaining your equipment is important when it comes to running your operations smoothly. Corrective maintenance software and preventive maintenance software are two of the main maintenance strategies used by organizations.

Both these strategies are essential. The philosophies of each approach are highly different, and they both have a rightful place in modern industrial services. In this post, we will discuss the difference between corrective and preventive maintenance.

What is Corrective Maintenance?

Corrective maintenance is a reactive strategy that implements remedial tasks to fix broken-down or faulty systems and equipment. In many cases, corrective maintenance is performed after an issue is identified during inspections or a separate work order.

Examples of corrective maintenance include emergency repairs, service outages, and quality assurance measures.

What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance is a proactive maintenance practice that is carried out on a schedule to help prevent unexpected failures. Its main goal is to reduce unplanned downtime and optimize asset performance to minimize downtime and cut costs.

This strategy is a cost-effective solution to infrastructure, equipment, and machine maintenance. Some of its examples include cleaning, inspections, lubrication, belt adjustments, part replacement, and recalibration.

Difference Between Corrective and Preventive Maintenance

Here are the differences between corrective and preventive maintenance:

1. Service Type: Corrective maintenance involves performing service only when required. Preventive maintenance is all about proactive, pre-scheduled servicing.

2. Costs: In corrective maintenance, there are no upfront costs incurred, but it may cost more in the long run because of unplanned downtime and higher costs of emergency servicing. In preventive maintenance, there may be higher upfront costs, but long-term savings will likely be realized.

3. Difficulty: Corrective maintenance doesn’t involve any planning or strategic work to complicate asset management efforts, as it is reactionary in nature. Meanwhile, preventive maintenance requires more upfront and ongoing effort and demands effective planning, whether short-term or long-term.

4. Goals: Corrective maintenance aims to save money and time by lowering maintenance costs and focusing on repairs only when required. On the other hand, preventive maintenance increases asset longevity and reduces risks of unexpected breakdowns and unplanned downtime.

5. Ideal for: Corrective maintenance is ideal for assets that are secondary to operations and easy to fix or repair. Preventive maintenance is suitable for assets that are critical to operations, expensive, complex, and long-lived.

Conclusion

Corrective maintenance software and preventive maintenance software are two important strategies used by businesses and organizations. The former is a reactive approach, while the latter is proactive. Maintainly is a revolutionary CMMS that makes it easy to execute preventative and corrective maintenance. It simplifies maintenance management. Maintainly's intuitive platform revolutionizes equipment maintenance, work orders, and asset tracking with automated workflows and real-time insights.