Corrective maintenance
Many servomotor installations around the world operate under corrective maintenance or run-to-failure scenarios. In this strategy, we wait for the equipment to fail and then repair or replace it, resulting in significant downtime due to lack of preparation. This is not the optimal strategy when the cost of downtime is greater than the cost of maintenance. With a predictive maintenance system, maintenance becomes predictable and enables preparation before an unexpected and costly downtime scenario occurs.
In the following pictures you can see scenarios of servomotors in a very bad state due to corrective maintenance, which does not require any planning, it only requires taking care of the failures day by day as they arise.
Parker servomotor
Fanuc servomotor – More information click here.
Heidenhain encoder
Due to the problems that corrective maintenance can cause in servomotors, drivers, installations, etc. when activity or production is repeatedly stopped and during unpredictable periods, it is not advisable to use it as a maintenance strategy in equipment or critical and indispensable elements of companies or installations.
ADVANTAGES OF CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE
- No investment in time, programming, etc.
- It does not generate fixed expenses.
- In the short term it can offer a good economic result.
- Profitable for equipment that is not significant in terms of production, costs, etc.
These are the reasons that tip the balance towards corrective maintenance in many companies. However, these companies forget that this type of maintenance also has significant drawbacks:
DRAWBACKS OF CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE
- Risk of major production stoppages and unpredictable timelines.
- Possibility of irreparable damage to expensive equipment or items.
- Purchase costs, urgent transport of spare parts or replacement items.
- Inability to optimize staff for the Maintenance Department.
- Increased risk and severity of occupational accidents.
A good planning of servomotor maintenance respecting a balance between cost and benefit, between how much to spend and what is solved with it, means in the long term an economic saving derived from the non-need to replace equipment with a longer useful life of the devices.
Although in practice there will always be a percentage of Corrective Maintenance in Asset (Equipment) Management, it has been proven that it will automatically decrease when the appropriate tasks of the other types of Maintenance begin to be carried out, such as Proactive Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance and Preventive Maintenance.
