Repair and maintenance are both essential to keeping equipment functioning efficiently with minimal downtime. While people often use the two words interchangeably, repairs and maintenance are very different activities.
Understanding the differences between repair and maintenance can help you develop a more effective maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) strategy. In this article, we’ll discuss the differences and similarities between repair and maintenance and how organizations can use each one to maximize uptime and reduce maintenance costs.
What Is Repair?
Repairs are reactive, rather than proactive. Repairs include all the work carried out to restore an asset to full functionality after it breaks or degrades. They are a form of corrective maintenance that addresses a problem after it occurs.
The repair process includes diagnosing machine faults, fixing broken equipment, and performing last-minute emergency repairs. Repairs can fall into several categories:
Deferred Repairs
Deferred repairs are repairs that are postponed. The reasons for postponing repairs could include a lack of budget, not having the personnel to perform the work, or waiting until a more ideal time to perform the repairs (such as during planned downtime).
Emergency Repairs
Emergency repairs are those that need to be performed as soon as possible because they pose a risk to operations or safety. This type of repair is prioritized above other maintenance or repairs and completed as quickly as possible to prevent further damage and/or protect staff.
Every maintenance strategy includes repairs. However, overly relying on repairs vs maintenance can strain maintenance teams, delay production schedules, and shorten asset lifespans. Frequent repairs can have ripple effects throughout the organization, like technician burnout and lost productivity.
What Is Maintenance?
Maintenance refers to all the routine preventive activities carried out to increase asset lifespan and improve performance. Typical maintenance tasks include routine cleaning and lubrication, changing parts, and inspecting machines for signs of damage.
Maintenance includes both proactive measures, which are taken to prevent failures, and reactive measures, which are intended to restore assets to working condition after failure. To put it another way, all repairs are a type of maintenance, but not all maintenance is a repair.
Types of Maintenance
Maintenance is a broad term that includes several categories of maintenance.
Preventive Maintenance
Preventive maintenance is a type of proactive maintenance planned based on time, usage, or other metrics. It aims to keep assets in good working condition by performing tasks before they’re needed. This includes tasks like replacing air filters, performing lubrication at certain intervals, or replacing components after a certain number of uses. Since preventive maintenance occurs on a scheduled basis, many organizations use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to automate preventive maintenance work orders.
Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance is another type of proactive maintenance. It uses information from the asset itself, such as from IIoT sensors, vibration analysis, thermography, or other predictive maintenance tools, to predict when a failure is developing. This information lets maintenance teams plan maintenance ahead of the failure, giving them time to plan maintenance tasks well in advance and avoid unplanned downtime.
Corrective Maintenance
Corrective maintenance, sometimes called reactive maintenance, involves repairing an asset to restore it to working condition after failure. Corrective maintenance repairs aim to restore asset functionality as quickly as possible. While this is a type of maintenance, it is done only after the problem has already happened.
Repair vs Maintenance: Key Differences
Maintenance is usually a proactively planned process. Repairs, however, are often unplanned and reactive. Maintenance focuses on upkeep; its goal is to keep assets functioning optimally. Repairs, in contrast, focus on restoration; their goal is to make a failed asset functional again.
Since most maintenance is planned, MRO teams can schedule maintenance tasks for convenient times. Cleaning, lubricating, and inspecting equipment can be done during scheduled downtime. Planned maintenance tasks usually don’t interfere with production. Overall, maintenance tasks are designed to minimize unplanned downtime and keep costs low.
Repairs, by contrast, are often done once an asset has already broken down, bringing production to a halt. Repairs are designed to minimize downtime resulting from equipment failure by restoring assets to full functionality as quickly as possible.
Repairs are typically more expensive than maintenance activities. Once an asset breaks down, it often requires significant time and labor to restore functionality. The cost of new parts — and their expedited shipping — adds to the overall expense. It’s normally much more cost-effective to perform regular preventive maintenance than deal with emergency repairs.
Common Examples of Maintenance and Repair Activities
Typical maintenance tasks include:
- Cleaning assets, components, and surrounding areas
- Inspecting machines for damage
- Calibrating instruments
- Changing parts
Typical repairs include:
- Correcting electrical failures
- Repairing major structural damage to an asset
- Replacing faulty components
- Diagnosing malfunctioning or poorly functioning assets
Cost Comparison: Repair vs Maintenance
Managers sometimes hesitate to invest in preventive or predictive maintenance because of its upfront costs. Preventive maintenance requires teams to spend time planning and scheduling maintenance, as well as managing spare parts inventory to make sure planned maintenance can be completed on time. Predictive maintenance can be even more expensive, since it requires tools like sensors, handheld thermography tools, and testing. Training employees in predictive maintenance principles and interpreting information from sensors or other tools may be required as well. But despite the upfront costs, a good maintenance program slashes downtime and increases productivity — which equals major savings for the organization.
Repairs are almost always more expensive than preventive maintenance. Restoring a failed asset to full functionality often requires extensive downtime, labor, and parts.
Waiting until an asset needs repairs, rather than proactively maintaining it, can also cause failures to escalate, creating an even bigger, more complex problem. That’s why most experts recommend using a proactive maintenance program instead of relying only on reactive repairs.
How To Create an Effective Maintenance vs Repair Strategy
If your organization has been relying more on performing reactive repairs than proactive maintenance, shifting to preventive or predictive maintenance can seem like a major change. But you don’t have to shift your entire organization all at once. Here are some key steps that can help you transition:
- Determine asset criticality: An asset criticality analysis reveals which assets are the most critical to keeping your organization productive. With this information, your team can decide which assets are the best candidates for preventive or predictive maintenance.
- Make preventive maintenance schedules: Use information based on repair history or original equipment manufacturer (OEM) recommendations to create preventive maintenance schedules for your more critical assets.
- Consider predictive maintenance: For the most critical assets, consider whether predictive maintenance could help you increase uptime even further by using real-time asset condition data to make more proactive maintenance decisions.
- Establish maintenance protocols: Set up standard procedures for submitting work orders, tracking all types of maintenance work, and ensuring all tasks are completed within their required time frame.
- Continuously improve: As equipment ages, production changes, or new technology becomes available, revisit your balance between repair and maintenance. Continuous improvement keeps your program aligned with business goals.
How CMMS Software Supports Repair and Maintenance Strategy
Using a high-quality computerized maintenance management system, or CMMS, facilitates a strong maintenance and repair services program.
Implementing a preventive maintenance program can be overwhelming. A CMMS simplifies the process by automatically scheduling and assigning preventive maintenance (PM) tasks. It provides a single location to keep track of what maintenance was completed, who completed it, and when it was completed, and can be used for tracking all types of work orders, whether for preventive, predictive, or corrective maintenance.
A CMMS can also monitor asset health by integrating information from IIoT sensors, SCADA systems, and other software. It stores safety and compliance data for easy audit recordkeeping and can track KPIs, making reporting on overall performance easy to access.
Lastly, a CMMS facilitates asset lifecycle management by supporting data-based decisions such as whether to repair or replace assets.
A great CMMS like eMaint makes integrating maintenance and repair a breeze, so you can achieve greater operational efficiency, increased uptime, and reduced maintenance costs.
