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One of the easiest ways to drive up profit margins in business without increasing the cost of your products is to provide good maintenance to your assets. No matter how big or small your business is, the key to success and continued growth is that the production line is never hindered in any way. And one of the most common causes for production grinding to a halt is a lack of maintenance.
Now, it is very common to advise businesses to implement a system of planned maintenance as it can in the long run often end up saving you more revenue especially if you’re dealing with expensive machinery with hard to obtain parts. However, planned maintenance can be expensive and is not the best fit for all situations.
On the other hand, corrective maintenance has often had the bad reputation of being a lackluster way of maintaining machinery as the strategy essentially involves waiting till a piece of machinery completely breaks down or becomes unproductive before attempting to repair or replace it. And while that is the definition of corrective maintenance, sometimes it can be a conscious choice and in some cases, the most economically viable solution as well!
So what are the advantages of using a Corrective Maintenance System? Well, we discuss 3 of the salient features in today’s piece.
Reduced Downtime
Since Corrective Maintenance takes place only when the machine finally gives up and cannot function anymore, there is obviously no downtime in between the installation and the failure phase. If you are using something that has a low failure rate and pretty high tolerances, this can be an absolutely huge pro. Downtime is one of the worst things that can happen to a production line and even though with something like preventive maintenance, you can plan your downtimes, it still does affect production especially since we can’t always predict when the machine is going to fail.
Reduced Cost of Running a Reactive Maintenance Strategy
Now a reactive maintenance strategy depends heavily on having a specific maintenance team that looks after the performance and health of your machinery and assets at regular intervals. Now while the scheduling aspect of it can be automated thanks to modern CMMS solutions, the actual repair work still has to be done by humans which can is a recurring expense. Now if repairs are costly and end up being nearly as much as buying a product brand new, then the cost savings are very minimal and overall the maintenance team might end up being a burden that costs you more in the long run. This is especially true if the expected life cycle of a machine does not increase by a massive margin post regular checkups and servicing!
Overall Reduced Costs of Maintenance
Now the biggest benefit of corrective maintenance is that there is little to no monitoring involved. The only thing that is required is a ready supply of spare parts in hand or in certain cases a replacement of machinery that shows a higher failure rate. All of these are fairly easy tasks for a CMMS and require no human intervention.
This is why on a grand scale of Corrective Maintenance can actually prove to be way more cost effective especially in smaller businesses and startups where the production line is not dependant on expensive and custom made machinery!
