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Preventive vs Corrective Maintenance: Planned Care vs Fixing What Broke

Preventive vs Corrective Maintenance: Planned Care vs Fixing What Broke

Corrective maintenance fixes equipment after it fails. Preventive maintenance services it on a schedule to stop failures. The ratio between them defines your maintenance maturity.
Preventive vs Corrective Maintenance: Planned Care vs Fixing What Broke
Preventive vs Corrective Maintenance: Planned Care vs Fixing What Broke

Key takeaways

  • Corrective maintenance is repair after a failure has happened.
  • Preventive maintenance is scheduled work to stop failures before they occur.
  • A high corrective ratio means firefighting; a healthy preventive ratio means control.
  • The goal is not 100% preventive — it is the right balance for each asset’s criticality.

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.

What corrective maintenance is

  • Repair after failure.
  • Unplanned, urgent, disruptive.
  • Often more expensive per event.

What preventive maintenance is

  • Scheduled service before failure.
  • Planned, resourced, predictable.
  • Reduces unplanned downtime.

Reading the ratio

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.

Why not 100% preventive

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.

How OEE relates

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.

Related reading

Frequently asked questions

Is preventive always better?

No — match to asset criticality and failure pattern.

What ratio should I target?

Most work planned; corrective for true surprises only.

Does preventive cost more?

Less than the unplanned downtime it prevents on critical assets.

How does this affect OEE?

Planned work protects Availability versus unplanned breakdowns.

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