An industrial manufacturing facility. Facility maintenance is simplified by using a CMMS.

What is Industrial Maintenance?

Industrial maintenance is the practice of maintaining industrial machines and preventing breakdowns. Industrial maintenance involves regular upkeep, emergency repairs, and long-term preventive/predictive strategies. It’s also called plant maintenance, as it often refers to industrial plant assets. The goal of industrial maintenance is to reduce downtime, increase asset longevity, and strengthen overall asset reliability. Poorly running machinery consumes excessive energy, leads to wasted materials, and causes costly downtime.

When industrial maintenance teams can keep assets running as designed, it helps maximize safety, output, and uptime, boosting the bottom line. Activities like the servicing, repairing, and replacement of machine assets — from as small as a bearing to as large as a building — in an industrial setting fall under the umbrella of industrial maintenance.

What are Some Common Industrial Maintenance Tasks?

Because industrial maintenance refers to such a wide range of assets, the types of tasks done vary widely as well. Across a variety of industries, some of the most common can include:

  • Performing preventive maintenance on a regular basis
  • Performing unplanned maintenance tasks in the event of breakdowns
  • Maintenance troubleshooting and repairs
  • Completing work orders
  • Installing new equipment or systems
  • Conducting machine disassembly as needed
  • Using maintenance KPIs to meet safety metrics and uptime targets
  • Handling all aspects of compliance and audits
A computerized maintenance management system, or CMMS, can help with many of these tasks.

Which Industries Use Industrial Maintenance?

An industrial maintenace worker reviews equipment data on a tablet

Industrial Maintenance Worker

All organizations that operate machinery use some type of industrial maintenance, whether or not they have an entire department devoted to it. A few that rely on industrial maintenance to operate include:

  • Manufacturing
  • Oil & gas/energy
  • Automotive
  • Food & beverage

Who Performs Industrial Maintenance?

Here are some of the common personnel you’ll find performing maintenance on industrial plants.

  • Maintenance Technicians are assigned general maintenance tasks, like fixing a motor. Technicians tend to have a more specialized skillset than the average mechanic, their duties ranging from responding to breakdown emergencies to analyzing asset data and failure causes.
  • Maintenance Planners and Schedulers ensure maintenance schedules are optimized so that techs are working on the right asset, at the right time, and have the right parts and information to do their jobs.
  • Maintenance Supervisors oversee technicians, ensuring work order completion level is high, resources are allocated correctly, and maintenance is performed efficiently. Supervisors also track overall team performance and maintenance KPIs.
  • Maintenance Managers look at the maintenance program with an eagle-eye view, judging the performance of techs, planners, and supervisors along with the overall machine health and reliability of the plant. Maintenance managers have the long-term goals of the organization in mind, developing and standardizing strategies that boost KPIs and make directors and presidents happy.

What Jobs are Available in Industrial Maintenance?

There are numerous types of industrial maintenance jobs, suiting a wide range of skill sets and education or training backgrounds. Demand for these roles is increasing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Apprenticeship programs are available, giving people the opportunity to gain hands-on experience and training. These apprenticeships can vary in length from one year to six years.

Most jobs in this field require a high school diploma or a GED, and in some cases, additional certifications. As technology changes, so does the field, creating new opportunities.

The industrial maintenance mechanic and industrial maintenance technician positions share similarities, though in many cases, technicians are more specialized. These jobs focus on installing, repairing, and maintaining industrial machinery. In addition, these roles are often tasked with testing and measuring equipment to assess performance.

Industrial electricians install, repair, and maintain electrical systems in industrial settings.

Industrial maintenance managers oversee people as well as assets. They ensure that their team is performing tasks correctly and on time, following guidelines and regulations, and meeting the long-term goals of the organization.

Industrial maintenance managers oversee planning and scheduling so their team has the right people, parts, and tools to perform their work. Prioritizing all of the work that needs to be done is critical to a successful industrial maintenance program. It involves communicating with maintenance team members and management, synthesizing an extensive amount of data, maintaining budgets, and more.

Industrial Maintenance Strategy

Industrial machinery, from common assets like motors to sophisticated systems like wind turbines, follows a lifecycle from installation to operation and eventually, end-of-life or breakdown. Maintenance is key to optimizing equipment lifespan—making sure assets perform effectively for as long as possible.

We often think of maintenance as an emergency response to faults, failures, or total breakdowns, and it’s true that industrial maintenance work is often reactive firefighting. Maintenance is vital to employee safety, like when ammonia compressor fails and toxic gas leaks. It’s also essential for compliance with key regulations from OSHA to FDA and IATF. And of course, maintenance keeps production going and revenue flowing: a worn bearing on a key engine may shut down an entire production line.

But relying on reactive or breakdown maintenance can be disastrous—wasting time, labor, money, and slowing down production.

Forward-looking maintenance strategies are the answer. Maintenance and reliability teams can harness the power of preventive, condition-based, and predictive maintenance to maximize uptime.

  1. Reactive maintenance is performed in response to machine assets having issues, ranging from minor faults to major failures. Reactive maintenance, also known as “run-to-failure” maintenance, is only performed when problems arise. A reactive approach is ideal for easily-replaceable parts like lightbulbs, but can be problematic for complex and/or critical industrial machines.
  2. Breakdown maintenance is a strategy in which workers wait until a machine fully breaks down or is out of operation before performing maintenance work. A breakdown maintenance strategy can make sense for non-critical assets, but can be dangerous and costly when applied to production-critical machines.
  3. Preventive maintenance (PM) strategy involves planning regular maintenance to prevent faults and failures. Preventive maintenance is scheduled based on regular time intervals or equipment usage intervals. A PM approach to industrial maintenance reduces the risk of asset downtime and is important for essential assets.
  4. Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is work done in response to asset condition data, like vibration or temperature levels, that gives insight into machine health and informs whether maintenance is needed. CBM is vital for sophisticated machines that need to be monitored.
  5. Predictive maintenance (PdM) is maintenance work performed in advance that is informed by predictive data, like detailed vibration data captured by wireless sensors. Predictive maintenance is a powerful tool for maxing the uptime and strengthening the reliability of your most critical assets.
  6. Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a framework that focuses on the big picture: what maintenance strategy is best for each asset or type of asset to achieve cost-effective uptime? A reliability-centered strategy calls on whatever approach is best for the job, from breakdown to PdM. Reliability-centered maintenance often involves Asset Criticality Analysis (ACA), Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) as methods to analyze assets and determine the ideal gameplan.

How do industrial maintenance teams manage and implement these strategies across their maintenance programs?

That’s where maintenance software comes in.An industrial maintenance worker in the oil industry communicates with their team from the field

Why Use Industrial Maintenance Software?

Industrial maintenance teams need maintenance software to manage, plan, and execute a winning maintenance strategy.

Maintenance software serves as a command center for work orders, asset management, spare parts inventory, maintenance KPI reporting, and much more. Leading maintenance management software also offer mobile apps, condition monitoring, integrations with key business systems, and global, multi-site capabilities.

Common software types include Computerized Maintenance Management (CMMS) systems and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) systems, which often overlap.

A CMMS or EAM empowers industrial maintenance teams to save time, simplify their work, cut costs, prevent downtime, and increase overall asset reliability.

eMaint CMMS can track all of the work done on every asset. When teams track, trend, and analyze asset condition data, they can make better decisions, prioritize their scheduling and spending, and reduce costs.

Increased visibility into industrial maintenance activities enables teams to identify trends, adapt to changing priorities, and improve their communication and processes. Centralizing all documentation — from contracts to manuals — simplifies the compliance process and ensures that maintenance team members can securely access the information they need anytime and anywhere.

To make the most of your industrial maintenance program, you need to define your goals and targets. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software can track metrics, generate reports, and deliver insights you can use to reach your goals.

Learn more about eMaint CMMS.