Meaning of Corrective Maintenance: Advantages and Disadvantages of Corrective Maintenance
What is corrective maintenance?
As corrective maintenance, it is called the one that is performed with the purpose of repairing faults or defects that arise in equipment and machinery.As such, it is the most basic way to provide maintenance , since it simply means repairing what has broken down. In this sense, corrective maintenance is a process that basically consists of locating and correcting faults or malfunctions that are preventing the machine from performing its function in a normal manner.
Given the simplicity of the old machines and the absence of a consumer culture, such as the current one, corrective maintenance was the most usual way to deal with machine failures until the 20th century.
Types of maintenance
As such, today there is a distinction between two types of corrective maintenance : contingent corrective maintenance and scheduled corrective maintenance.Contingent corrective maintenance
The corrective maintenance or unplanned contingent is one that is carried out forcibly and unexpectedly, when a fault occurs, and that imposes the need to repair the computer before you can continue using it. In this sense, the contingent corrective maintenance implies that the repair is carried out as quickly as possible to avoid material and human damage, as well as economic losses.Scheduled corrective maintenance
The scheduled or planned corrective maintenance is one that aims to anticipate possible failures or malfunctions that may present a team from one moment to another. In this sense, it tries to foresee, based on previous experiences, the moments in which a team must undergo a maintenance process to identify worn parts or possible breakdowns. Hence, it is a type of maintenance that proceeds by making a general review that diagnoses the state of the machinery. Likewise, this type of maintenance allows to fix in advance the moment in which the revision is going to be carried out, so that hours of inactivity or little activity can be exploited.Advantages and disadvantages of corrective maintenance
The main advantage of corrective maintenance is that it allows to extend the useful life of equipment and machinery by means of repairing parts and correcting faults. In this sense, it frees the company from the need to buy new equipment every time one breaks down, which would raise costs. In addition, another of the advantages of performing corrective maintenance is the possibility of programming it in advance of any damage, so that accidents can be prevented and production avoided.The disadvantages of corrective maintenance are related to the impossibility, in many cases, of predicting a failure, which forces a mandatory stoppage of production while the problem is detected, the spare is obtained and the defect is solved. In this sense, the costs and times of repair, when an unforeseen failure occurs, are always an unknown.
Corrective maintenance in Computing
In Computing, corrective maintenance is usually necessary to keep a computer running correctly and efficiently. In this sense, corrective maintenance may well address failures at the hardware level (hard disk, memory, video card, monitor, etc.), or at the software level , when these are caused by viruses or programming errors, between other things. Hence, maintenance for computer equipment is, as for industrial, contingent or scheduled.Also read "Meaning of Preventive Maintenance".
