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.
Corrective maintenance is repair after the fact. The asset fails, the line stops, and the team responds under pressure. It is unavoidable for genuine surprises, but a plant where most work is corrective is reacting to its equipment rather than managing it.
Preventive maintenance is scheduled work done before failure — inspections, replacements and services timed to keep assets healthy. It is planned, resourced and predictable, and it moves downtime into controlled windows instead of mid-shift emergencies.
Two identical plants run the same critical compressor. Plant A waits for it to fail — corrective — and loses a full shift twice a year to emergency repairs at premium cost. Plant B services it on a planned schedule during a weekend window; the same parts get replaced, but with no production lost and no overtime. Same equipment, same failure modes — the only difference is whether the work was planned or reactive, and that difference is two lost shifts a year.
A plant running mostly corrective work is reactive and unpredictable. Mature plants do most work planned, reserving corrective for genuine surprises. The planned-to-reactive ratio is a headline maintenance KPI — and moving it is the essence of maintenance maturity.
Over-maintaining stable, low-criticality assets wastes labour and can even induce failures through unnecessary intervention. Match the strategy to criticality — preventive where failure hurts, run-to-failure where it does not. The goal is the right balance, not preventive everywhere.
1. Living in corrective mode. Reactive firefighting is expensive and unpredictable.
2. Preventive on everything. Over-servicing trivial assets wastes labour.
3. No criticality basis. Strategy assigned by habit rather than failure consequence.
4. PM tasks that do not prevent anything. Calendar work that never matched a real failure mode.
Unplanned corrective work hammers Availability at the worst times. Shifting to planned preventive work moves downtime into controlled windows and lifts OEE — fewer mid-shift emergencies, more weekend services.
Fabrico shows the planned-versus-reactive split and the Availability cost of corrective work, so you can prove the case for shifting the ratio. Book a demo to see your maintenance mix in OEE terms.
No — match it to asset criticality and failure pattern; over-servicing stable assets wastes effort.
Most work planned, with corrective reserved for genuine surprises.
Less than the unplanned downtime it prevents on critical assets.
Planned work protects Availability by moving downtime out of production time.
For low-criticality assets and genuine surprises that no schedule could have caught.
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