Key takeaways
Short answer: Corrective maintenance fixes equipment after it breaks — reactive and disruptive. Preventive maintenance services equipment on a schedule to stop failures happening. A plant dominated by corrective work is firefighting; shifting the ratio toward planned preventive work is the core of maintenance maturity. The aim is the right balance per asset, not preventive everywhere. See also condition based vs time based maintenance.
A plant running mostly corrective work is reactive and unpredictable. Mature plants do most work planned, with corrective reserved for genuine surprises. The planned-to-reactive ratio is a headline maintenance KPI.
Over-maintaining stable, low-criticality assets wastes labour and can even induce failures. Match the strategy to criticality — preventive where failure hurts, run-to-failure where it does not.
Unplanned corrective work hammers Availability at the worst times. Shifting to planned preventive work moves downtime into controlled windows and lifts OEE.
See how Fabrico captures this automatically on your lines — explore OEE for manufacturing or book a demo.
No — match to asset criticality and failure pattern.
Most work planned; corrective for true surprises only.
Less than the unplanned downtime it prevents on critical assets.
Planned work protects Availability versus unplanned breakdowns.
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