The Three Types of Care Involved in Industrial Maintenance

Anyone involved in the business of working with machinery knows there are three types of industrial maintenance. At some point in the lifespan of a factory, the workers will come across and have to implement all three of the types. They include corrective, preventative, and predictive forms. Of the three, corrective is the one most companies should strive to avoid. It costs the most, contributes to the most downtime, and can cut into profits. If you can concoct a program that focuses on prevention and prediction, you will have a well-oiled machine (both figuratively and literally) that doesn't need to put a damper on production.

Correction

Corrective industrial maintenance is both the category a business should most strive to avoid and the most common form of repair. This is true of factories, big business, and the average individual. Ask any car mechanic and they will tell you they see far more drivers come into the shop with a problem than they do drivers who come in wanting scheduled prevention. In turn, these people wind up spending much more than they otherwise might have. The same is true in the sector of industry. Companies who don't spend enough time keeping their machinery working well on a daily basis wind up paying for it with correction and repair.

Prevention

Preventative industrial maintenance is far from sophisticated, but it can be a tremendous help when it comes to caring for your machinery. In its simplest form, it is little more than following a manufacturer's blueprints for scheduled activities. To go back to the car analogy, this is the equivalent of taking your vehicle in for an oil change every 3,000 miles. While most drivers can see fit to do this, it's easy to see that it is the most basic form of taking care of a car. Still, one can hardly argue with the results. Even adhering only to such a schedule can add a great deal of longevity to any machine.

Prediction

If you want to implement a culture of predictive industrial maintenance, you need employees or contractors with a high degree of training and skill. To put such a program into place, you need people who can monitor the equipment, make adjustments as necessary, and pay attention to warning signs that indicate a problem may be developing. It also involves looking at production output and determining if a machine is slowing down. By putting this type of industrial maintenance into play, a company can all but ensure they seldom see correction and major repair become a problem.