If your business deals with specialized or complex equipment (anything from cranes and forklifts to excavators and HVAC systems), you’ll need to perform equipment maintenance from time to time. How regularly you do it will depend on the equipment you’re inspecting, the size of your maintenance team, and the resources you have available.
he most common maintenance approaches include proactive and reactive measures, and are usually carried out via inspections. The 6 types of maintenance businesses use most often are:
- Preventive maintenance
- Corrective maintenance
- Predetermined maintenance
- Condition-based maintenance
- Predictive maintenance
- Reactive maintenance
These 6 approaches can be split into proactive and reactive types of maintenance. Preventive, predictive, and predetermined maintenance are proactive, since they focus on finding possible issues yourself before a larger equipment failure occurs. Corrective, condition-based, and reactive maintenance are all reactive, since any maintenance occurs only after the undesirable outcome has already happened.
Generally speaking, proactive maintenance approaches tend to keep your operations and equipment running smoothly for longer than reactive ones. That said, they work best when you have enough workers to perform checks regularly without losing production time. For example, predictive maintenance is possibly the most accurate way to foresee and resolve defects, but it takes a lot of resources to get a predictive maintenance strategy off the ground.
It’s understandable that smaller businesses might opt for a reactive approach to equipment maintenance. Whatever you decide on, it’s always a good idea to have some funds set aside in case bigger issues pop up. Even regular proactive inspections don’t always uncover every problem.