What Is Emergency Maintenance?

Emergency maintenance is the ultimate test for any organization. Emergency maintenance means that something aspect of your operations has gone disastrously wrong and requires immediate attention to prevent further risk to health and safety. Emergency maintenance is also warranted if a critical asset has failed and has stopped production or affected safety.

Such an unpredictable and sudden event may call for all hands available to stop what they’re doing and focus on stopping the crisis from escalating. Emergency maintenance is unpredictable, but emergencies do happen and your team must be prepared to handle them when they occur.

Emergency Maintenance Best Practices

Although your emergency strategy will be unique to your company’s size and scope, there are four rules that can help guide any emergency maintenance plan:

1. Evaluate Your Risks and Emergency Protocols

Consider the assets and inventory you have and assess the risks and possible emergencies for each. Make sure your team understands what constitutes an emergency and establish clear workflows for emergency response. For example, how will personnel submit an emergency request? What approvals are required? Who is qualified to respond in an emergency situation, and so on.

2. Get Ahead of Emergency Maintenance with Preventive and Predictive Maintenance

You can significantly reduce your risk of emergencies by being proactive in your maintenance strategy. Regularly scheduled preventive maintenance is a must to keep machines running smoothly. You can also take it a step further by using condition monitoring to keep a pulse on the health of your equipment and get alerted when problems start brewing. Using this condition monitoring data to predict and resolve maintenance issues before they escalate is known as predictive maintenance.

To learn more, see the How to Shift to a Predictive Maintenance Strategy.

3. Keep Your Maintenance Backlog to a Minimum

Emergency maintenance is often the result of maintenance tasks that have gone unaddressed for too long. When you have too long of a backlog, it also often means you are understaffed, and your team will struggle to adequately respond to emergency situations.

4. Train Your Staff

Your team should feel confident in the maintenance tasks assigned to them—emergency or otherwise. A leading cause of emergency situations is human error, so making sure your team has the tools, training, and time they need to perform their tasks thoroughly and accurately will go a long way towards preventing emergencies in the first place. And if an emergency does occur, they should be well-prepared to respond accordingly.

Examples of Emergency Maintenance

Unplanned maintenance doesn’t always mean an emergency. An urgent maintenance request also may not be an emergency. Here are some common scenarios that constitute an emergency in industrial settings:

  • Fires
  • Flooding
  • Service outages
  • Sewer line blockages
  • Gas leaks
  • Total failure of production-critical assets

Types of Reactive Maintenance

There is a major difference between emergency maintenance — that must be resolved regardless of the hour — and urgent problems that can wait until regular business hours.

Both emergency maintenance and corrective maintenance are a type of reactive maintenance—which just means that the maintenance is not planned. These types of maintenance activities are a reaction to a situation that has already occurred. That makes it very different from
proactive maintenance strategies like preventive and predictive maintenance.

Difference Between Emergency Maintenance and Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is meant to prevent emergencies with strategic planning and scheduling. Preventive maintenance typically involves following a time and/or usage-based schedule to keep equipment running smoothly. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) helps maintenance teams stay on track with scheduled maintenance and keep detailed maintenance records for all assets.

To learn more, see What is Preventive Maintenance?

Difference Between Emergency Maintenance and Corrective Maintenance

Like emergency maintenance, corrective maintenance or breakdown maintenance is a reaction to any sort of equipment failure. Corrective maintenance, however, is used for non-emergency situations. A corrective maintenance strategy is needed for problems that require attention but haven’t escalated to the point of shutting down production or causing a safety issue.

For example, if a component or non-critical asset breaks between scheduled maintenance visits, you would perform corrective maintenance to repair it. The issue was not planned and requires corrective action, but it’s not an emergency.

Both corrective and emergency maintenance plans should be prepared so that your team can respond appropriately to both emergency and non-emergency situations.

Stay Prepared for Any Maintenance Challenge

Emergency maintenance is a critical aspect of any organization’s operational preparedness, ensuring maintenance teams are prepared to take action quickly to prevent risks to health, safety, and production. To effectively manage emergencies and streamline your maintenance processes, consider leveraging a comprehensive CMMS like eMaint to take control of your maintenance management.