Preventative, Predictive, and Corrective Maintenance - What's the Difference? (Brandon Vincent)

When it comes to equipment, fleet, or facilities maintenance, several classifications exist: preventative, predictive, and corrective. Preventative and predictive maintenance aim to prevent failures from occurring in the first place while corrective maintenance corrects problems that are discovered. Each of these maintenance types has its time and place.

Preventative Maintenance - Most people are familiar with the term preventative maintenance. After all, if you drive a car, you likely know that it needs regular oil changes, tune-ups, and tire rotations. These services are recommended by the car's manufacturer at specific intervals with a goal of preventing problems and extending the life of the vehicle or its components. For example, by changing the oil regularly, you are ensuring that your car's engine is well lubricated and that dirty oil is replaced with clean oil. By rotating your car's tires, you can even out wear and get more mileage out of them. The same concept applies to manufacturing equipment, oil drills and pumps, power generation equipment, HVAV systems, and other high value assets. Preventative maintenance is usually prescribed based on time or usage. For example, every six months or every 5,000 miles.

Predictive Maintenance - Though similar to preventative maintenance, preventative maintenance is a technique used to evaluate the current condition of equipment or machinery in order to see if a preventative task is warranted. For example, if you're supposed to rotate your car's tires every six months but have only driven a fraction of the normal miles, your car's tires may not be worn enough to justify a rotation at this point. Predictive maintenance is less reliant on prescribed schedule and more reliant on the equipment's actual condition. Predictive maintenance uses a combination of condition monitoring tools, thresholds, and statistics to determine the most appropriate time for maintenance.

Corrective Maintenance - Where predictive and preventative maintenance typically take place before a failure, corrective maintenance usually takes place after a failure has been detected. For example, fixing a flat tire is a form of corrective maintenance while keeping tires balanced, rotated, and properly inflated is a form of preventative maintenance. Corrective maintenance is used to restore equipment, machinery, system, building, or component to its operational condition so that it can once again perform as intended. Corrective maintenance is typically urgent as breakdowns tend to be disruptive to operations or production. Unlike preventative and predictive maintenance which can be scheduled around operations and are considered proactive, corrective maintenance often must be scheduled with no notice and is considered reactive in nature.

Companies should embrace both preventative and predictive maintenance. As a result, the need for corrective maintenance will fall accordingly.

Brandon Vincent is knowledgeable in corrective maintenance software or sistema de mantenimiento in Spanish. He recommend investing in one of these corrective maintenance software as they can help reduce risk from occurring in your business operation.