The Three Essential Maintenance Types in Industry

Industrial maintenance — which keeps equipment running or restores it to working order — optimises production lines and is therefore essential for business productivity.

There are several types of maintenance. In this article, we explain the three most widely used.

Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is designed to restore an asset to working order. It is generally divided into two types: curative maintenance and palliative maintenance.

Curative maintenance aims to deliver a long-term restoration and helps improve overall business performance.

Palliative maintenance is carried out after a failure has occurred, in order to repair it. It is therefore comparable to traditional troubleshooting, as its objective is to return a faulty asset to working order. Palliative maintenance is performed as an emergency measure and allows an asset to operate on a temporary basis.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance avoids the need for corrective maintenance, which frequently generates significant unplanned costs. It acts before a technical problem arises, with the aim of reducing the probability of equipment failure. To implement it, teams draw on the failure history of the machines they manage.

Thanks to Maintenance 4.0, they can identify the periods during which a machine is most likely to break down or reduce productivity.

Within preventive maintenance, a distinction is made between systematic and condition-based preventive maintenance.

Systematic preventive maintenance is carried out at clearly defined time intervals and allows certain components to be replaced on a regular basis.

Condition-based preventive maintenance consists of monitoring key parameters and indicators in order to anticipate malfunctions and breakdowns.

Towards Predictive Maintenance

To simplify operators' work, processes are increasingly digitalised. Most companies now use computer-aided maintenance software, which recommends relevant interventions based on the risk of unplanned stoppages.

Zozio also simplifies operators' day-to-day work through the optimisation of their industrial processes, in particular through predictive analysis of their logistics.

Companies with complex maintenance processes use a CMMS (computerised maintenance management system). Starting from a measure of asset degradation — which may be physical, chemical, or otherwise — the CMMS applies statistical probabilities to sustainably improve business productivity through optimal maintenance.

Through machine learning, the CMMS enables fast and effective decision-making on upcoming maintenance interventions. This is what is known as predictive maintenance.

For many companies, the cost of implementing such maintenance is far outweighed by the significant savings it generates.