Less commonly known or understood than, “preventative maintenance”, which typically involves maintenance work to prevent breakdowns, reactive maintenance instead focuses on maintenance strategies and measures that take place after an incident, malfunction or breakdown. Here, we provide an essential and complete guide to reactive maintenance.
What Is Reactive Maintenance?
As suggested, reactive maintenance refers directly to maintenance work to repair malfunctions or breakdowns that occur after they have already happened and are implemented to restore normal operating conditions before use. This is in direct contrast with preventative maintenance services, which involve implementing maintenance work as part of a scheduled maintenance plan. For this reason, reactive maintenance is generally considered a cost-effective alternative to preventive maintenance, as it typically takes far less time and money to carry out the necessary repairs; however, this does come with its own caveats, as reactive maintenance may not be sustainable in the event of valuable machinery breaking down.
Types Of Reactive Maintenance
A term provided for maintenance work that takes place after a breakdown, or in response to an immediate issue, reactive maintenance is split into four subcategories, breakdown maintenance, run-to-failure maintenance, corrective maintenance and emergency maintenance.
Breakdown Maintenance
This type of maintenance directly refers to work or actions that take place after a breakdown of equipment or machinery. This means that the equipment or machinery will no longer operate at all, failing to start and therefore in need of repairs or replacement. Breakdowns are generally unplanned or unexpected, and require maintenance in almost every case, making it one of the most common types of reactive maintenance.
Run-to-Failure Maintenance
This will involve the deliberate action of allowing a piece of machinery or equipment to break down to then perform reactive maintenance on the machinery when this inevitably happens. Run-to-failure maintenance is a planned action, one that is performed deliberately and with intention and usually will involve smaller maintenance work as its more cost-productive to fix these
Corrective Maintenance
The term provided for smaller maintenance work designed to restore a malfunctioning piece of equipment or machinery to its working order, “corrective maintenance”, typically applies to minor defects that are picked up on before they become more significant problems that would later result in a complete breakdown.
Emergency Maintenance
This type of maintenance is in direct contrast with breakdown maintenance, as it is never planned and is instead only ever implemented as a last-minute response to a sudden breakdown of a valuable or vital piece of machinery. Emergency maintenance is labelled due to the threat to health and safety posed by these kinds of incidents, and generally involves issues such as safety lock fails or hazardous moving parts.
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