Preventive vs corrective maintenance: building a balanced maintenance strategy
Not every asset needs the same maintenance approach. Learn the difference between preventive and corrective maintenance, and when each is the right choice.
Maintenance teams face a recurring question: do we spend on scheduled maintenance before failures occur, or wait for equipment to break and then repair it? The right answer is usually a deliberate mix of both.
What is corrective maintenance?
Corrective maintenance is repairing equipment after it fails. It can suit low-criticality, relatively inexpensive assets whose failure does not stop the line. Relying on it alone for critical equipment leads to unplanned downtime and higher repair costs.
What is preventive maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is scheduled work — inspection, lubrication, adjustment and replacement of wear parts — carried out by calendar or running hours to reduce the likelihood of failure.
How to choose
- Rank assets by criticality: which failures stop the whole line?
- Review failure history: recurring faults signal the need for preventive work or root-cause correction.
- Estimate downtime cost: compare the cost of an hour of lost production with the cost of a maintenance programme.
- Hold critical spares: preventive maintenance loses value if parts are unavailable when needed.
The takeaway
An effective strategy reserves preventive maintenance for critical equipment, accepts corrective maintenance where downtime impact is limited, and is reviewed periodically against real failure data.
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